Big data software maker SAS Institute yesterday officially opened a massive building in its Cary, N.C. campus that will house what could be called a rapid response cloud analytics.
The opening of the new building, which took 27 months to construct, took place a day before SAS’ Analytics and Leadership 2014 conference in Las Vegas.
Reporting a 35 per cent increase in revenue, CEO Jim Goodnight said the 22,000-square foot, six storey structure with 671 offices, will house the company’s SAS Solutions OnDemand team that will help federal and state government agencies customers. The building has been called Building Q.
The SAS OnDemand team is headed by John Brocklebank. He also head the company’s lead advanced analytics lab in Cary.
Building Q is the 23rd building in the SAS campus. The company expects to finish construction by 2016 of another 247,600-square foot structure that will be called Building P. The building will have enough space for some 750 employees. That will mean additional SAS new hires to the 5,300 the company already employs in Cary. Worldwide, SAS has some 14,000 employees.
“The campus expansion is a symbol of SAS’ continued growth and commitment to innovation,” said Goodnight in a speech before government officials in North Carolina. “We’ve seen growth not just in cloud analytics, but in analytics as a whole. SAS owes its growth and success, in large part, to listening to our customers.”
Goodnight said SAS has so far delivered 27 new data management and analytics products and added new features to another 160 products in the past year. He said Visual Analytics, the data visualization tool the company launched two years ago, now has 2,600 licensed customers.
Goodnight said SAS is expanding its software portfolio that supports the Hadoop Distributed File System.