The SAS Institute, which launched a Hewlett-Packard version of its data analysis and applications development package popular with mainframe corporate users back in May, after carrying out a major re-write of the package from PL1 and assembler language into C, is now ready with a version for Sun Microsystems Inc workstations. Along with a DEC version for Ultrix, Sun hardware was high on the list of SAS customers present at the last SAS user group meeting held in Copenhagen. SAS, which is claimed to be the largest privately-held software company in the US, has set up a strategic alliance with Sun in order to market the new version, which runs on Sun-3 workstations under SunOS: a Sun-4 version optimised for the SPARC architecture is also on the way. Sun claims that user demand for the SAS software on Sun has exceeded all expectations, and that the new version will be offered as a complementary product to existing users of the SAS System on IBM mainframes, DEC VAXes, Data General, Prime and Hewlett-Packard minicomputers and personal computers by virtue of the communications options already in place. SAS now claims to have software installed in 95% of universities worldwide, and at 90% of Fortune 1000 companies.
