SAS's Goodnight won't say goodbye yet
Published: 23 May 2006 16:05 BST
It is 30 years since Jim Goodnight and John Sall founded a company called SAS Institute (now simply SAS) and built it to a £1.7bn turnover on the ideals of excellence in software development and best practice in people management.
Through those years, Goodnight has kept a fierce hold on a company that has become a byword for prodigious application development. It now numbers its software products in the hundreds, covering areas like the financial sector, government applications and CRM as well as the core business intelligence (BI) market.
Last week, ZDNet UK caught up with Goodnight in Geneva at the company's annual forum and asked him about the next version of the core SAS software suite, the future for applications development, and his plans, or lack of them, for life after SAS.
You will only release software when it is ready. Other companies have a different approach. Do you have any advice for them?
Well, Microsoft is a monopoly, they can do what the hell they want to. The consumer doesn't really have a choice so there is no incentive for Microsoft to make any changes in the way they operate.
I think, to some extent, that Oracle is getting to that perch in the database business. Yet there is a lot of movement in the database business with open source software. We use one called Firebird. They should do something about it.
We had an experience when we were thinking about going public and our consultants said that we needed to get off SAS for our internal ERP work because it is just not a recognised brand and they suggested Oracle. It was Ernst and Young and we spent three or four years and $10m and it was just outrageous. And in the release (of Oracle) that we were working on there were over 10,000 bugs. That's horrible.
Is that a good reason not to make SAS a publicly quoted company -- because the software doesn't work?
Well it works now. I am only using that as an example but I am sure that Oracle ships a lot of buggy software. You know -- the customer knows -- that a new release means lots of bugs, lots of problems. But that's not what it should mean and not what it means from us. It really upsets me that CIOs of the world have in their mindset that they don't want to mess with a new release because it's full of bugs.We did not give customers that impression. It's the other vendors, like Oracle and Microsoft, that have given software a bad name.
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3 comments
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Having several years experience in SAS, been invol... Pascal Guignard -
I fully share your opinion Pascal, we are exa... Etienne Baert -
Forget to add this in my post:
It becom... Etienne Baert
