SAS Institute SA, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in SA this year, grew its revenue by an impressive 52% in 2004 - making it the top performing SAS subsidiary in the world.
This strong performance is attributed to growing local recognition of the value of an enterprise-wide intelligence strategy, the leveraging of compliance requirements into competitive advantage and the trend towards supplier consolidation. Other contributory factors include the launch of the groundbreaking SAS 9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform, the company's recent industry focus, and the release of a new generation of business solutions.
"More and more organisations are recognising the value to be gained from an enterprise-wide intelligence strategy, and uptake has been significant," says Bill Hoggarth, managing director of SAS SA.
"During 2004 we entered into a number of multimillion-dollar engagements with customers, including the Old Mutual Group, Eskom, the Department of Social Development, SARS, Nedbank, Absa, the Department of Foreign Affairs and MTN."
Contributing further to SAS's success was increasing realisation among major companies that compliance with the latest governance regulations and legislation offers a goldmine of opportunity.
"The reality is that all major organisations are now obliged to spend heavily on compliance," says Hoggarth. "Through an intelligence strategy, we are able to help them leverage the cost of compliance to competitive advantage in an ever more difficult, globally competitive environment."
Last year also saw a drive to cut costs, particularly in IT, through supplier consolidation.
"Many of our customers had a number of different business intelligence (BI) suppliers at the start of 2004," says Hoggarth. "During the year we saw a strong trend to reduce these to one or two. This benefited SAS, whose core and only competence is intelligence."
Hoggarth believes that last year heralds the start of sustained good results for SAS and the intelligence market in general.
"Intelligence is a wonderful market to be in, not because it promises great rewards to vendors, but because of the very real, quick rewards that accrue to customers," he says.
"A long-term engagement, for example the establishment of an enterprise-wide intelligence infrastructure, can pay for itself along the way with quick wins and rapid return on investment."
US-based holding company, SAS, also announced continued financial and customer success for 2004, with annual revenue up 15% over 2003. Total revenue for the year reached $1.53 billion, clearly establishing SAS as the leading provider of business intelligence software.
This performance marks the company's 28th consecutive year of revenue growth and profitability.
"Our unique advantage is SAS's ability to deliver intelligence across organisations faster than anything else on the market," said SAS CEO Dr Jim Goodnight.
"We are committed to understanding the industry-specific challenges of our customers and providing them with rapid value. SAS offers customers not just visibility into their data, but also resolutions to emerging business issues that have made it to the top of corporate agendas. We made significant investments in hiring and new technology during a down market so that we'd be in a strong position when the economy rebounded. That shows itself in our results."
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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