SAS Reports $3.09 Billion In 2014 Sales

Business analytics software developer SAS reported sales of $3.09 billion in 2014, up 2.3 percent from $3.02 billion in 2013, fueled by customer demand for cloud analytics and data visualization tools.

That marked the company's 39th consecutive year of revenue growth. SAS said Thursday that growth for the year was 5.1 percent in constant currency.

SAS, one of the IT industry's largest privately held companies, generally doesn't report detailed financial results and does not disclose bottom-line earnings. The company is something of a bellwether for the business intelligence industry: IDC recently said SAS is a top company in the global business intelligence software market, and held 35.4 percent of the 2013 advanced and predictive analytics software market.

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"SAS is the market leader in analytics, and we plan to stay there," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, in a statement. "SAS Cloud Analytics lets customers take full advantage of the cloud, and we are blazing trails with big data. We expect to be the No. 1 provider of analytics for Hadoop. And we offer the most powerful data visualization software on the market today."

SAS said its "strong partner ecosystem is a consistent factor in the company's success," with the channel influencing 30 percent of new sales in 2014 and half of the company's largest deals. That included "substantial activity" in the areas of fraud management, risk management and analytical platform modernization.

Last year, SAS struck a global reseller agreement with distributor Arrow Electronics, which broadened the availability of SAS' products worldwide and helped the company recruit and train 80 resellers worldwide.

SAS said that "strategic partnerships will receive renewed attention and investment" in 2015.

Revenue from the SAS Cloud Analytics service grew 24 percent during the year, the company said, with more than 400 customers in 70 countries subscribing to the service. The company opened a new building on its Cary, N.C., campus to house its growing SAS Solutions OnDemand development and support team.

Sales of SAS Visual Analytics, launched two years ago and now used at nearly 3,400 customer sites, continued to grow in 2014 with revenue increasing by 12 percent. The company shipped two new releases of the product last year, offering new deployment options such as public cloud, and the ability to work with new data sources such as Hadoop and SAP HANA.

Sales of SAS' high-performance analytics, customer intelligence and data management tools also showed strong growth in 2014, the company said. Altogether, the company added 2,045 new customers, bringing its customer base to 75,000 sites.

The software company spent 23 percent of revenue on research and development in 2014. Jim Davis, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, promised in a statement that those investments would continue in 2015, resulting in some "innovative new products" this year.

PUBLISHED JAN. 29, 2015