SAS Institute is a privately-owned Cary, North Carolina-based (US) provider of business analytics, which operates through 200 offices across 100 countries in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Africa. It employs nearly 10,000 people and has recorded revenues of over $1.5 billion (USD) in 2004, which was an increase of about 14 percent over 2003.
SAS believes it is uniquely positioned to provide companies with a suite of software products that, when integrated, provide more complete business insight from both a historical and a forecasting view. Specifically, SAS can provide companies with easy access to any data source, enabling it to more efficiently process the data and generate reports—both historical and predictive—in the format that the user wants.
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence (BI) software and services that create enterprise intelligence. Its data warehousing (DW), extract, transform and load (ETL), and data mining software gather, manage, and analyze enormous amounts of corporate information to find patterns in customer data, manage resources, or target new business. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites—including 96 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune Global 500, and is used in almost every major US government agency . It has enabled companies to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers and to execute better, more accurate, and informed decisions.
Having been a leader in deep-dive analytics since the mainframe era, SAS has lately focused on sustaining its technology leadership, in part through a number of well thought-out acquisitions and by expanding its entrenched presence in some vertical markets. To that end, the vendor offers a range of products, solutions, and services for a number of different industries, including automotive, banking, energy, utility, financial services, government, education, healthcare, insurance, life sciences,...