In reply to Nick Rose.

Nick, thanks for the thoughtful comments.

I do agree we've taken the "space program" analogy a bit far -- while I like to draw the similarities using a reference that mostly my American audience will relate to, we all know that government-sponsored endeavors often have aspects of waste and misguided motivations. Clearly, with SAS as a private company and its long history of commercial success, we are less vulnerable to such things.

I appreciate that you don't feel that you need high-performance analytics right now. In fact, Jim Goodnight said as much during our meeting. "Most SAS users don't need high-performance analytics", he said. But some customers have an urgent need to solve huge problems against big data, and those customers have a high-impact on us: they may be finance services, health care, or even governments. Thus, it's encouraging for all of us to see SAS lead in this area.