Hot for software data

Although little known outside the world of technology, software from US statistical software firm SAS is likely to have had some impact on your life in some shape or form. It is used to decide the price you pay to gamble on slot machines in Las Vegas, retail outlets locations and where products are stocked within them and even model your mortgage risk rating.

This week, the company that prides itself on providing statistical tools that enable patterns to be seen in huge amounts of data brought 1,400 customers and staff to Stockholm, Sweden, to hear business and technology leaders discuss innovation and performance.

SAS is unique in many ways in the world of software. Founded in 1976, SAS is the largest privately held software company in the world. It also claims to have had unbroken annual growth and profits every year since culminating in revenues of $1.9 billion last year. It has had a single chief executive over 31 years, Dr Jim Goodnight.

Sitting with European media in Stockholm, it is clear that Goodnight is not comfortable doing interviews and admits to sometimes being a reluctant manager. "I love to program - I sometimes wish I could just do that and not have to be a manager," he says.

Business intelligence is hot at the moment with companies like Business Objects, Cognos, SAP and Oracle competing to provide business people with query and reporting tools that give them insight based on the large amounts of data their other software applications are gathering.

"When I say business intelligence, I'm talking about the low- end stuff like Cognos and Business Objects do - the query and reporting stuff," says Goodnight.

"You don't need a bunch of PhDs to use your software, just an ordinary manager can ask for a report, so that was the whole idea behind us getting into the low-end business."

SAS entered that area two years ago. There has been a round of acquisitions and consolidation in the market but Goodnight believes that plays into SAS's hands.

"If the acquisitions keep taking place, we'll be the only one left and we'll be the biggest," he says matter-of-factly.

Despite being in his mid-60s, Goodnight has no plans to retire ("you can't play golf every day"). However, some say his decision to close the European corporate headquarters last year suggested he may be setting the company up for a sale. Not so, he says.

"There was not only duplication but undoing of things and redoing it their way. I got tired of paying for that. We felt it was important to have a single message across the globe and be a global company."