Interview: 'Gentle' SAS out to conquer (banking) world

Up until recently, SAS Institute could have been called the software industry's best-kept billion-dollar secret. That was before Jim Goodnight, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the world's largest private software company, went into high-profile mode this past year, appearing on American mainstay TV shows "60 Minutes" and "Oprah."

The attraction for the mainstream media is that Goodnight appears to be an "anti-Bill Gates," a soft-spoken executive in an era of rapacious corporate chieftains, running a highly successful company based in Cary, N.C., where laid-back staff extol great company benefits that make company employee retention rates legendary throughout the high-tech industry. Even veteran industry analyst Mike Schiff, at Current Analysis, has called SAS the "gentle giant." But make no mistake: Goodnight is as ambitious as the next software mogul and his goal, bluntly stated in this IDG News Service interview, is to dominate the world financial software market by leveraging SAS' expertise in statistics and analysis applications.

A few days before the company's 28th annual SAS Users Group International conference (SUGI 28), at the company's New York offices, Goodnight took a break from visiting banks to answer questions, charting the company's course from its core analysis and statistical applications. In this edited Q&A, he talks about SAS' latest products, including a new reporting and query tool dubbed Citation, slated to be unveiled Monday at SUGI.

IDGNS: Since its founding, SAS steadily branched out from its roots in statistical software and a focus on a few core markets, and during the past few years seems to be expanding more rapidly into new markets, especially in finance. How much broader is the company going to go?

Goodnight: SAS right now is already extremely broad. We cover everything from manufacturing to retail to banking to insurance. One of the things we've done over the last five years or so is to take the basic SAS tool set, wrap some knowledge around it and come up with solutions that apply across industries. For example Financial Management Solutions, ABC Technologies (analytic-based activity management), Supplier Relationship Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Marketing Automation run across all industries.

What we also are doing is verticalizing some of our sales groups. We still maintain three geographies in the U.S. But in addition to those three geographies everyone in financial services is under one roof now. We've also chosen the pharmaceuticals and the health-care industry as another vertical.

Given that, we began to see there was a need for the power of our analytical capabilities to meet federal compliance regulations imposed by the [U.S.] Patriot Act. Every financial institution in the country now is being required to put some software in place that helps detect money laundering. The financial sector already represents 35 percent of our revenue worldwide. So we have a huge untapped market for compliance with antimoney laundering. We have a product that went out last month, and we've got another release coming out in July, tailored specifically to helping banks and firms meet the requirements of the Patriot Act.