DI: More than 45,000 business, government and university sites rely on SAS. Can you tell us about some of your key clients?
AM: SAS customers represent many of the world’s most innovative and successful organizations– including 91 of the top 100 FORTUNE Global 500 companies. They use SAS to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers, to enable better decisions and to move forward with confidence and clarity.
We are fortunate to have a large and diverse set of customers spanning geographies—115 countries— industries and size. The great thing about SAS is that no matter what your starting point, SAS extends to help you meet evolving needs. One of our oldest customers, State Farm, was featured at SAS Global Forum this year; they continue to derive value from SAS after almost 30 years of use. Many of our new customers are SMBs.
DI: Why do SMBs choose SAS versus lower-priced implementations from smaller vendors?
AM: That’s an excellent question and one more people should ponder. SAS offers software and services that can be customized to meet both the SMB’s needs and its budget. Some customers initially tried out another vendor based on price, only to come back to us a year or two later, saying they wished they had selected SAS from the start. We see too much over-reliance on spreadsheets, which are ubiquitous in most organizations. The operational risk of spreadsheets alone has caused many companies to reassess where they have exposure. Spreadsheets are good for the right purpose and we all use them but, for many applications, there are more effective and efficient options that can deliver ongoing value.
Whatever the starting point for SMBs to do more with their data, their investments in business intelligence should be like building blocks so they don't have to rip, replace and retool. Even if the starting point is spreadsheets, extensible business intelligence tools should leverage that and allow organizations to evolve their use of data to provide continuous learning and improvement. Examples of SMB successes are in case studies and in press release form. Using SAS, SMBs are making informed decisions to satisfy both short- and long-term goals. I like the SAS SMB case studies about The Wine House, StubHub and BioMimetic.
SAS has the depth of resources to sustain excellence in product development and customer support. SAS customers receive a full suite of support services at no extra charge, including skilled telephone technical support and unlimited, around-the-clock online technical support.
Stability matters, too. While many competitors have merged, changed ownership or simply vanished, privately held SAS remains focused on our primary mission: delivering superior software and enhancing customer relationships. We reinvest a substantial percent of revenues in R&D each year so we can continually improve our products. This commitment to innovation is one reason why the overwhelming majority of our customers renew their software licenses with SAS every year.
DI: What is the process if someone wants to evaluate your software solutions?
AM: Call 800-727-0025. We are happy to provide evaluation copies of software to the customers and prospects who want to assess capabilities or try proofs-of-concept/value. For many organizations, analytic bandwidth is constrained. For those short on analytic bandwidth, we can prove the value first and give them options in how they may want to proceed – continue to outsource, take advantage of mentoring services to bring in-house or hire and train the right skill sets to further leverage and expand on their initial approach.
A quick note for those in academia: Professors and students can apply for free software grants, regardless of country.
DI: What can we expect to see coming from SAS in the coming months?
AM: This year's SAS Global Forum brought news announcements about SAS’ new fraud framework featuring SAS Social Network Analysis, new SAS Campaign Management software as a service, SAS’ plans to offer R integration, SAS OnDemand for Professional Education, as well as SAS and Teradata’s Analytic Advantage and Optimization Services packages.
In the coming months, we will announce new capabilities in the areas of risk and performance management. In addition, we continue to extend our fraud framework, further leverage text analytics capabilities with Teragram, execute on our in-database strategy, invest in sustainability management, pursue more integration with R, expand in the SaaS area, and more. We are committed to helping organizations harness the full potential of their data to improve performance and gain the competitive advantage they need.
As Senior Director of SAS’ technology product marketing in worldwide marketing, Anne Milley oversees the marketing of SAS technologies. She has authored various papers, articles and an award-winning report for the 1999 KDD Contest. Milley co-chaired the SAS Data Mining Technology Conferences, M2001 and M2002 as well as SAS’ inaugural forecasting conference, F2006. She has served on web mining committees for KDD and SIAM and on the Scientific Advisory Committee for Data Mining 2002. Milley has a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts in economics from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. She did post-graduate work at Aachen Technical University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen) and is proficient in German.