This morning, FORTUNE Magazine announced their 100 best places to work in America. For the second year in a row, SAS came in at #1! As you can imagine, we're all pretty excited around here. But, you might be thinking, "So what? Why do I care?" Our Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Jim Davis answered this question when SAS won this prestigious award last year. But, here is what I think it means to you - our SAS Training students:

Remember that miserable professor you had in college? The one who clearly despised his job and was counting down the days to retirement? You won't find anyone here like that. Our instructors love their jobs and love working with our customers. They genuinely want to help our customers solve their business problems with SAS. This means you will receive the absolute best SAS training and you will receive it with a smile.

Coincidently, SAS Training also received a #1 award this week. KD Nuggets, an online resource for the data mining community conducted a poll asking "What data mining / analytics conferences did you attend in 2010?" The top response went to the M2010 Data Mining Conference, which is hosted by SAS Training.

In case you're thinking about attending the Data Mining Conference this year, you'll need to look under a different name: Analytics. We're combining the annual Data Mining conference with our annual Business Forecasting Conference into an Analytics Conference Series. This educational event will cover all the key topic areas associated with analytics including data mining, forecasting, text analytics, data visualization, operations research, predictive modeling and data optimization. You also won't find us in Las Vegas this year. We'll be hosting the event in Orlando, October 24-25. We hope to see you there!