SAS Institute Inc, the Cary, North Carolina-based software house responsible for the SAS System modular information delivery package, has revealed that it has been working with Digital Equipment Corp on the Alpha RISC programme since 1990, and says it will have a VMS version of SAS System for Alpha ready to ship by the time Alpha/VMS becomes available (which SAS believes will be at the same time that Alpha/OSF/1 ships). Steve Darbyshire, marketing manager at SAS’s Marlow, Buckinghamshire-based UK subsidiary, SAS Software Ltd, says SAS in the US was approached by DEC back in November 1990, when DEC was looking for a reliable software vendor to test the conversion process from VAX/VMS to Alpha/VMS. Darbyshire says SAS – which today runs in IBM mainframe, DEC VAX/VMS, Unix, and MS-DOS and OS/2 environments – took seven weeks to convert, and that 100,000 of SAS System’s 3.5m lines of code had to be changed in the process. According to Darbyshire, an implementation of SAS for OSF/1 is also in the pipeline. He notes with glee that, whereas SAS will be there when Alpha ships in volume, Oracle Corp has committed to implement its database software only after the product becomes available. SAS Institute is a successful private company, and intends to stay that way, with no plans to go public – SAS values its ability to plough 45% of its revenues back into research and development, and never wants to let go of the competitive lead enabled by this policy. The firm has just reported $295.1m revenues for the year to November 30, up 23% on 1990. It claims to be very profitable, but emphasises again that these profits go straight back into product development which is guided strictly by user proposals (CI No 1,690). Europe’s contribution was $107.3m, up 34%. The company continues to recruit – it now has 2,500 staff worldwide, 500 in Europe including 120 in the UK – and says it has received curricula vitae from former employees of its competitors, which include executive information system developers Pilot Software Inc and Comshare Inc. Darbyshire actually attributes the company’s success to the recession, and says that SAS predicted such results some 18 months ago, since it had witnessed a similar phenomenon in the early 1980s. Why should SAS benefit from other firms’ hard luck? Well, Darbyshire reckons that when companies tighten their belts, they become more selective about what they buy, and since the SAS System offers many different products combined under one umbrella, and for a relatively modest price, it wins out every time. Tesco Stores Ltd and Scottish Equitable are two recent major wins that SAS is able to talk about, both organisations using the system particularly for its executive information system – EIS – component, which SAS is now aggressively marketing. At Tesco, SAS came up against Comshare’s offering, but the Marlow firm says Tesco didn’t rate Comshare’s Commander product, claims SAS. SAS has recently been concentrating on pushing out version 6.07 of its SAS System, which Darbyshire describes as out of this world, particularly the object-oriented EIS development layer, which he says will enable users to produce prototypes of customised EIS systems in a matter of weeks or even days, instead of months. SAS, which has 3m users worldwide, hopes to match Comshare’s 1,000 EIS installations by this time next year. SAS’s European users will meet again this summer, this time in Vienna, Austria.
