1966–1979: Founding and early history The Statistical Analysis System (SAS) began as a project at
North Carolina State University's agricultural department. It was originally led by
Anthony James Barr in 1966, then joined by NCSU graduate student
James Goodnight in 1967 and
John Sall in 1973. in order to analyze the effect soil, weather and seed varieties had on crop yields. The project was funded by the
National Institutes of Health and later by a coalition of university statistics programs called the
University Statisticians of the Southern Experiment Stations. By 1976, the software had 100 customers and that year, 300 people attended the first SAS user conference in Kissimmee, Florida. Goodnight, Barr, Sall and another early participant,
Jane Helwig, founded SAS Institute Inc. as a private company on July 1, 1976, in offices across the street from the university. Barr and Helwig later sold their interest in the company. Many of the company's employee perks, such as fresh fruit, reasonable work hours and free
M&M's every Wednesday became part of its practices that first year. In the late 1970s, the company established its first marketing department. Later that year, it began providing on-site daycare in order to keep an employee who had planned to leave her job to care for her child at home. and was frequently recognized by national magazines like
BusinessWeek,
Working Mother and
Fortune for its work environment. In 2007, SAS revenue was $2.15 billion, and in 2013 its revenue was $3.02 billion. By the late 1990s, SAS was the largest privately held software company. It had the highest ratio of its revenues spent on R&D in the industry for eight years, setting a record of 34 percent of its revenues in 1993, as it was working on a new menu-based interface. SAS funded its first advertising program in 2000 with a $30 million television and radio campaign. SAS was one of the few technology companies that did well during the downturn and hired aggressively to take advantage of available staff. The
European Court of Justice ruled that functionality and language elements were not protected and the case was discussed in
Oracle v. Google SAS introduced its first reseller program intended to grow sales with small to medium-sized businesses in 2006. Leading up to 2007, SAS provided funding and curriculum assistance to help start the Master of Science in Analytics program at nearby
North Carolina State University. The company's cloud-based products grew in revenues by 35 percent in 2014 and the construction of Building Q was completed late that year to house its corresponding operations. In March 2014, SAS launched its SAS Analytics U initiative to provide free foundational technologies and support to teachers and students.
2019–present: Artificial intelligence and international expansion In 2019, SAS announced that it was investing $1 billion into further
artificial intelligence R&D, as part of a broader push to develop software in the fields of
machine learning,
deep learning,
computer vision and
natural language processing. The investment will also fund related initiatives such as acquisitions and the creation of education programs to teach the public about the applications of AI. That year, SAS partnered with
Nvidia to produce offerings related to AI and deep learning. Under that partnership, Nvidia
graphics processing units (GPUs) and
CUDA-X AI acceleration libraries will support SAS' AI applications and models. SAS partnered with Microsoft in 2020 to allow users to run their SAS workloads in the cloud with
Microsoft Azure. This partnership has also facilitated co-engineering between the companies in the areas of generative AI and data management, such as integration between
OpenAI and SAS' analytical systems. SAS also partnered with
TMA Solutions in 2020, with the latter consulting on AI adoption. That year, SAS launched the SAS Software Certified Young Professionals in collaboration with
Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation with the goal of training 500 students in programming, machine learning and analytics through online courses. In May 2023, SAS announced its intentions to invest an additional $1 billion into AI applications for the banking, healthcare, and insurance industries over the next three years. The company's
chief technology officer Bryan Harris stated that "[we] think this is where the second leg of growth of SAS over the next 50 years is going to be." This investment in AI contributed to the company's expansion in international markets, especially China. The majority of this development has focused on the creation of "pragmatic" artificial intelligence with present-day applications. In addition to integrating artificial intelligence into its existing platforms, the company launched several new platforms related to AI development in 2023 and 2024, including
SAS Viya Workbench, a development environment used for building AI models, and AI application development platform App Factory. It also launched Viya Copilot, a
generative AI assistant for developers and data scientists. SAS Data Maker, a synthetic data platform, was introduced in 2024. It was announced that the company would integrate Hazy's data generation capabilities into SAS Data Maker.
Initial public offering preparations In July 2021, the
Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant
Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS. In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale. In July 2021, SAS announced that it was preparing for an
initial public offering (IPO). As of September 2023, the company had invested between $50 million and $60 million into internal preparations for its
IPO, which was estimated to take place in 2025. Since then, the company has been overhauling its operations so that it can operate as a publicly traded company. It consolidated its financial systems into a new single new system, a process completed in January 2025. In May 2025, the company appointed Gavin Day
chief operating officer to oversee the company's IPO. Day has stated that the company plans to go public "when the market is ready", as the company has no debt and no financial pressure to go public by a specific date. That month, the company discussed its plans to go public as a way of planning the company's executive succession. The public offering would also allow the company to offer
stock options to employees. ==Operations==