SAS executives on the larger issues that affect a global business

The analytics market is hot. We’ve been saying that for a while now, and so have many industry experts. If you didn’t believe it before now, check out our newly released 2011 financial results and see if that doesn’t convince you. SAS earned US$2.725 billion in revenues last year, a 12 percent increase over 2010.

If you really want a picture of how hot the analytics market is, there’s no better indicator than SAS sales. After all, SAS has 35 percent market share for analytics, and the other nine analytics vendors behind us don’t own 35 percent of the market combined. In other words, our competitors are doing some work with analytics, but their revenues come from other areas as well.

Need another indicator? Our head count for 2011 was up 9.2 percent globally. What does that mean? It tells me, again, that the value proposition of analytics is hot. We initially had plans to grow head count by 4 percent last year. We never thought we’d grow by more than 9 percent, but demand for analytic solutions has been high, and we had to hire to keep up with the demand.

You know, I really like this time of year. January is underway and New Year’s resolutions are still hanging on. Our sales staff is in town to kick off another great year, our revenues are up again – and one of our favorite workplace awards has been announced.

This year, we ranked #3 in FORTUNE’s Best Companies to Work For list. We’ve been on the list every year since its inception and this is the ninth time we've been in the top ten.

The bottom line this year - and every year - is that SAS is appealing to customers and employees not only for its software and solutions but also for the genuine relationships we foster. Long-term business deals are based on the relationships that our employees build with customers, and that’s why the FORTUNE award is so important.

Technology alone cannot sustain you as a business. If we want to maintain our 36-year streak of growing revenues, we know the relationships we build with employees and customers are just as important as our solutions. As more and more technologies become commodities, those relationships will become even more important.

Right now, SAS has both: the best people and the best analytics. It’s a great place to be. So, watch out 2012. Things are only going to get hotter!

Are you a last-minute holiday shopper? Or the type that has everything bought, wrapped and tagged before Thanksgiving? It's safe to say, I do all of my shopping the week before Christmas.

Whether you’re shopping late or shopping early, you’re probably looking for the best deals - and so are retailers. They want to make sure you’re happy with the price you pay while they still make a profit. What’s the secret to making sure customers get a deal and retailers don’t mark down too much? Analytics, of course.

This marketplace podcast, “The secret life of discounts,” from American Public Media does a great job explaining how customer data, seasonality and regional demographics can all be used to help optimize markdowns, promotions, product placements and more.

Enjoy the insights, the shopping and the holidays. See you in 2012.

A few years ago, we had this big debate between the terms business intelligence and business analytics – and which one was more accurate or reflective of the products in our industry. I don’t hear those arguments anymore. Some still say business intelligence and business analytics are one and the same. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What does matter is that organizations are really starting to differentiate themselves through the application of analytics to large business problems.

Now that we have moved past this educational phase to a period of action, we’re talking to customers more frequently about how to implement analytics in their industries and their organizations, and where the opportunities lie for them to differentiate with analytics as well. One of the technologies we’ve been demonstrating that has caught the attention of customers and the media alike is SAS High-Performance Computing.

I’ve been present a few times recently when our lead developer has been on stage to run through a large marketing optimization problem with real data from the telecom industry. The problem itself looks at millions of customers, hundreds of possible marketing offers, multiple delivery options and various other detailed business constraints. Each time, we are able to show how something this complex, which used to take 12 hours to calculate, can now be completed in two to three minutes. And the best part is that you don’t need extensive server farms and mainframes to do it. Today’s advanced analytics and fast processing speeds make it possible to run high performance computing on an appliance that’s a fraction of the cost of yesterday’s server farms.

When we demo’d this same high performance analytics scenario to a large group recently, I witnessed an audience member approach the developer afterwards and say, “That could be my data. We have very similar optimization problems we are tackling, and they take 16 hours to compute, not 12!”

After another demonstration at the Disney Analytics Summit, I could practically see the light bulbs appearing over audience members’ heads. These are people who know how to look for opportunities. They aren’t asking, “Well, why do we even need to have that data any sooner?” Instead, they’re asking, “If we had those results sooner, how could we improve our business?”

Participants at the SAS Championship Golf Tournament were asking themselves the same questions this week when SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, Thought Leader Tom Davenport and Bloomberg Senior Marketer Bill Colihan discussed the potential of high performance computing there. Clearly, this technology provides an opportunity to take another look at your business processes to see what you can modify or improve if you’re informed more quickly.

Anybody who says, “But I don’t need the data that quickly,” needs to check themselves right now, step back and ask, “What if I did get it that quickly? What could I do differently? What could I do better?“ The opportunity is right there in front of you if you take it. How can you change the way you operate your business? What processes can you improve if you’re getting answers 95 percent faster than before?

Much has changed since last year, when the Premier Business Leadership Series was held in Hong Kong in August 2010. Back then the economy seemed like it was on a path towards recovery from the economic crisis of 2009. Growth in Asia was prominent across the region and the effects of the economic downturn at the time were hardly making an impact. Fast forward to present day, and we find ourselves in a much more precarious situation, potentially headed for a double-dip recession.

In fact, the two greatest challenges, as determined by an audience of 800 leading economists, government officials, policy makers and business leaders from across Asia Pacific who were polled during our Global Economic and Business Outlook panel discussion that kicked off PBLS 2011 last month in Singapore, are the Eurozone debt crisis and the US political gridlock. As these uncertainties plague the future outlook of the world economy, we discussed what sort of impact this would have on economic growth in Asia and whether the region would be as impervious to these threats, this time around.

Vikram Nehru, former Chief Economist for East Asia and the Pacific of the World Bank, stated that Asia would certainly be impacted and that he expected Asia would decline by about a half percentage point or so. Yet he remained confident that overall development in the emerging markets of Asia would be spurned by rapidly rising incomes, the rise of Southeast Asian trade, and the potential of the relatively underdeveloped services sector, all of which would fuel the engine for continued growth.

Bernard Yeung, Dean at NUS Business School, viewed the slowing growth in the US and the Eurozone as an opportunity for Asia, citing that investment in productivity instead of relying on government stimulation would be essential. Johanna Chua, Managing Director and Chief Asia Pacific Economist and Head of Asia Pacific Economic and Market Analysis, Citigroup, concurred that the S&P downgrade has handcuffed fiscal policy in the US and that this will move buyers and investors to seek “safe haven” assets. According to Chua, in past sell-offs, buyers moved to investing in gold and other precious metals to mitigate risk but now they are moving to emerging market bonds. “This is an opportunity for parts of Asia to become a safe haven,” she said. “This could provide an opportunity for more infrastructure investment and a rebalancing of the economy. It could be an opportunity to take advantage of the low-yield environment to invest in higher-return investments.”

Brett King, author of BANK 2.0, cited the growth and advancement of technology and the speed at which information spreads has accelerated the exposure of risk; yet there remains a solid opportunity in the offering of new technology platforms. Value-creation in the economy is going to shift, and the consumer is going to lead this. This is where analytics comes into play. The future of success for an organization will rely on its ability to manage risk and have a strong understanding of consumer and public sentiment to anticipate behaviors and trends. And the only way businesses, governments and economies will be able to attain this will be through harnessing data and applying analytics to make better decisions and create value in an increasingly complex and changing environment.

I think it was Bernard who put it best in saying that, “There are a lot of opportunities and a lot of land mines with future changes. It must be a back to basics in Asia in that you need to know what you are getting into – not just today but in the future.” It is apparent that the rest of the world will be keeping a closer watch on how the markets in the East will respond as we head into the end of what has been a very momentous year.