Cary, North Carolina: A tour of its carefully tended, 300-acre corporate campus here leaves little doubt why surveys, year after year, rate SAS Institute Inc., the world's largest private software company, among the best places to work.
There is the subsidized day care and preschool. There are the four company doctors and the dozen nurses who provide free primary care. The recreational amenities include basketball and racquetball courts, a swimming pool, exercise rooms and 40 miles of running and biking trails. There is a meditation garden, as well as on-site haircuts, manicures, and jewellery repair. Employees are encouraged to work 35-hour weeks.
Academics have studied the company’s benefit-enhanced corporate culture as a model for nurturing creativity and loyalty among engineers and other workers. Six years ago, in a report on 60 Minutes, a news magazine on US channel CBS News, correspondent Morley Safer called working at SAS “the good life”.
Nurturing creativity: A day care centre subsidized by SAS in Cary, North Carolina. The US software firm, which encourages employees to work 35-hour weeks, is consistently ranked among the best places to work. Jeremy M Lange / NYT
But that good life is under threat today as never before. SAS’ specialty, a lucrative niche called business intelligence software, is becoming mainstream. Free, open-source alternatives to some of the company’s products are increasingly popular. On the other end of the spectrum, the heavyweights of the software industry—Oracle Corp., SAP AG, Microsoft Corp. and, especially, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)—are plunging in and investing billions of dollars.
“It will be a dogfight,” says Bill Hostmann, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “SAS has never faced a competitor like IBM And I do think IBM sees SAS as a big, fatted cow.”
The term “business intelligence software” applies to a wide range of products and services, but all the technology is aimed at helping businesses mine nuggets of insight from mountains of data. SAS has traditionally specialized in advanced software to analyze huge data sets and to generate predictive statistical models for large corporations and government agencies.
Credit card companies, for example, use SAS to detect unusual buying patterns in real time, and to spot potentially fraudulent charges. Giant retail chains use SAS to tailor pricing and product offerings down to the store level. Telecommunications companies use SAS to identify the few thousand customers, among millions, most likely to switch to another cell phone carrier, and to aim marketing at them. SAS software is also used to parse sensor signals from North Sea oil rigs, combined with weather and structural data, to predict failure of parts before it happens. Of the 100 largest companies worldwide, 92 use SAS software.