Going Above And BeyondGoing Above And Beyond

Already a SAS customer, Taylor called Goodnight. As it happened, SAS was developing analytical applications for spotting potential money-laundering transactions. Using the bank's data, SAS was able to develop a proof-of-concept system by the next day; the bank installed the software shortly thereafter.

It's no surprise that Taylor called Goodnight, SAS's co-founder and majority owner. Goodnight plays a direct role in many aspects of the company's operations and remains deeply involved in the development of SAS's products. He did the basic design for the anti-money-laundering application himself and spent a lot of time visiting financial-services customers in New York last year during the product's development. When others within the company targeted SAS 9.1 for a June release, Goodnight vetoed the idea after scrutinizing the quality-assurance "bug count" reports. "We just won't ship our software until all the bugs are out," he says. Components of the SAS 9.1 suite are now slated for September.

Although SAS once focused heavily on applications for analyzing scientific data, the company's expanding product line has fueled its momentum. Last year, more than 16% of SAS's revenue was generated by sales of analysis software for CRM, financial management, and performance management. And in the last two years, the vendor has acquired Verbind, a developer of customer-behavior tracking apps; ABC Technologies, for activity-based costing-analysis tools; and marketing campaign-management software from Intrinsic.

Still, executives tout the company's prowess with such advanced capabilities as data mining, text mining, and predictive analytics. "Analysis is looking forward, not back at what you did," Goodnight says. And competing products? "They're just query and reporting. You can only get back what the database provides," he says.

Trouble is, basic query and reporting, "the bread and butter of business intelligence," is what 90% of all workers need, Buytendijk says. SAS 9.1 attempts to address that. Its Report Studio and Web Report Studio meet, respectively, the needs of tech-savvy business analysts and those with little technical expertise. Also new is Office Integration, which links back-end SAS analytical software with Microsoft Office applications, giving workers familiar desktop apps as front-end tools for complex analytical chores.

Equally significant are new development capabilities for tailoring the user interfaces of SAS applications for various "personas," or types of users with different data-access and -analysis requirements, though SAS isn't the only vendor doing that. And by year's end, SAS will debut releases of its analytical apps with data models and key performance metrics for vertical markets such as financial services. The analytical apps will sport new forecasting and optimization capabilities.

Meanwhile, to help compensate for its low profile, SAS has doubled the size of its sales force in the last two years. And sales reps are being retrained to speak the business-benefits and return-on-investment language of the line-of-business managers and CXOs they're increasingly selling to.

Quaker Chemical's Tyler describes his relationship with SAS like this: He identifies an IT need and calls SAS, and someone comes by to demonstrate the capabilities of what it has to address that issue. "I have never been asked to buy a SAS product," he says.

These days, the soft sell might be the most successful one of all.

Photo of Goodnight by Photo by Kyle Hood