SAS has a rich heritage in academia, and we know that lots of colleges (and even some high schools) use SAS to teach students statistics and research methods.

Now SAS (the company) has made it easier for professors to offer courses that use SAS. This fall, SAS offers the SAS OnDemand for Academics program. It's part of a growing trend of the "other" SaaS (software as a service), where SAS hosts the computing power of the SAS System here at headquarters, and students and professors use a downloadable version of SAS Enterprise Guide to connect and complete their coursework.

This is an offering that I'm personally proud of, because my R&D team here at SAS worked to adapt SAS Enterprise Guide to work well in this environment. I'm pleased to say that we needed to apply only a few tweaks to get things up to snuff -- including making sure that it all works on Microsoft Vista. Other folks assembled an impressive collection of support material to help students and professors get started.

The result is a small software footprint that makes SAS more accessible to folks who need to learn, without requiring them to have the IT infrastructure to support a SAS installation. Completely altruistic on the part of SAS? I think that's a big part of it. But students who use "SAS in the class" will one day join the work force, and hopefully become professional SAS customers.