SAS quietly going about its business of pioneering data mining and CRM software

Chances are that you have never heard of software company SAS. And chances are you've never heard of the company's co-founder and chief executive, Dr Jim Goodnight.

"Certainly, SAS is on everyone's lips," Dr Goodnight drawls in a tone of mock offence across the phone line from company headquarters in Cary, North Carolina.

But even people who consider themselves au fait with the technology industry often cannot quite place the company. It doesn't often hit the tech headlines - search the giant tech news site News.com for stories on SAS, and they are few and far between.

Yet SAS has plenty to talk about. The data mining and decision support company is the largest privately held software company in the world. It has 8,500 employees, including a small contingent of 14 in the Republic, and has recorded double-digit growth every year since it was founded in 1976. Some 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are SAS customers.

And Dr Goodnight has won plaudits not just for business acumen but also for the way in which he's made the company a good place to work - consistently a winner of top workplace awards, and known for providing a supportive environment for working parents.

Perhaps it's just that the company sells software that emerged out of the need to analyse agricultural statistics - not the sexiest of technology corners at first glance. Or that the company has remained private, allowing it to get on with its business while removed from the spotlights and downright silliness of the market in the past few years. Or that Dr Goodnight has not jumped into the occasional CEO media brawls, or been connected to high-profile national court cases, or been part of Silicon Valley's West Coast social scene.

Instead, he's known for quiet good humour and Southern friendliness. He's focused on continued expansion as well as important footnotes, such as putting crΦche facilities for his employees into SAS workplaces.

Unusual for a chief executive, he even started a children's school in Cary that would put an emphasis on using technology in the classroom.

"We are not a consumer company," he says, by way of explaining SAS's low profile.

But SAS is big in the corporate world, where company information systems generate streams of data that need to be sorted and analysed.

Even in a downturn (or even more so, argues Dr Goodnight) companies need to sift their information.

Thus, SAS is now in what most analysts see as one of the few bright segments of a dull software market. Most of the big technology players - IBM, Oracle, SAP - have added data mining acquisitions in recent times.

But SAS pioneered what is now commonly known as CRM - customer relationship management - by getting intelligence into database software.

Using a mix of statistical analysis and probability models, SAS's goal is to be able to tell you not just that your sales of teapots have been increasing by 5 per cent monthly over the past six months, but that your customers want to purchase teabags from you as well - and perhaps coffeepots.

The company developed from work Dr Goodnight was doing for North Carolina State University in the 1960s, analysing data from agricultural research facilities around the state. At the time, the work was done on huge mainframe computers and individual programs had to be written for each job.

"Over time, we realised we could develop a system for reading data," says Dr Goodnight, who put himself through university working as a programmer.

When federal funding for the analysis project ran out in 1976, 120 companies agreed to pay for the service - which by now, was interesting not just agricultural researchers but big data collectors such as pharmaceutical and insurance companies. SAS was born.

As might be expected from the chief executive of a company that has spent 25 years developing its software, Dr Goodnight is dismissive of many younger companies attempting to elbow their way into the data mining market. "There's a lot of companies saying they're doing data mining" - but they're really just asking basic questions of databases, he says.

CRM - "that's a term we helped coin" - pulls all the data on customers and then analyses it, producing probabilities for customer behaviour. Insurance, banking and pharmaceutical firms - all big data producers - remain big customers. The company has 900 banks and 800 insurance companies as clients, Dr Goodnight says.

But SAS is also involved in more exotic markets, such as data mining for lingerie manufacturer Victoria's Secret, and the esoteric - crunching data for the Human Genome project. Banks use the products to spot anomalies that might signal money laundering.

There's some unusual charitable work being done by SAS as well - managing a database of rhino footprints for Rhinowatch, for example, which lets the conservation organisation track animals without using radio collars. SAS software also helped figure out the corrections needed for the mis-designed Hubble Telescope.

And security applications? Data mining seems a likely tool for a post-September 11th world.

"We're working with one of the (security) agencies on intrusion detection," says Dr Goodnight. And the military branches in the US use the software to plot troop movements.

A constant criticism of data mining software is its complexity. Companies may be dazzled by the prospect of whipping all their data into order, but the reality is that the effort takes much fine-tuning of complicated software.

Dr Goodnight says SAS recognises the problem. "We've tried to make SAS as easy as possible" - but ideally a company should also have people trained in statistics who also know all the data sources within a firm.

Dr Goodnight says the company is heading for double-digit growth in 2001, despite the downturn. "So far, Europe is doing especially well, with close to 30 per cent growth." He says there has been "a little bit of slowdown in new sales revenue" and adds that he expects profits to be flat as he wants "to use this year as an investment year".

He won't be drawn on predicting when the economy will begin recovery or analysing how SAS will perform, but says companies have spent "an incredible amount of money on IT over the past few years. It's time to add some intelligence to that" - an opportunity for SAS.

What does he think will be the company's priority in the coming year? "We'll just try to continue looking after our own employees," he says. And looking further into the future, how does he think he might be remembered? He has to think for a while. "I'll probably be remembered for creating a company that people want to work for," he says, adding: "But also a provider of software that enables people to understand their companies."