The analytics software company announced that it achieved a 5.2 per cent increase in global revenue during 2010 compared to the previous year, posting a record US$2.43 billion in total revenue for the year. SAS credited a lot of the growth to the continued interest in its business analytics products, which saw revenue increase 26 per cent last year.
In Canada, SAS actually saw year-over-year revenue growth outpace the global figure, with the Canadian subsidiary recoding a nine per cent increase in total operating revenue and a 10 per cent increase in total software sales for 2010.
The privately held company said it could not disclose any absolute dollar amounts specific to the country.
Carl Farrell, president of SAS Canada and executive vice-president of SAS Americas, said the growth was support by strong interest in fraud, analytics and data management solutions by its large government, financial and oil and gas customers.
“The Canadian market has been steady,” Farrell said. “The demand has certainly been there a littler earlier from banks and insurance companies for our fraud solutions.”
He added that SAS Canada, which currently has 263 employees across its eight Canadian offices, has begun to hire for 25 new positions to facilitate the growth.
“We continue to be a very strong private organization in Canada,” he said. “We encourage people to look us up and learn a little bit more about SAS and its opportunities in a growing and increasingly relevant space.”
The available positions will be at SAS Canada’s sales, pre-sales, domain support, and consulting units, Farrell said. He added that the new positions will be spread out across the country, with the largest concentration being in the Toronto office.
Farrell also did not rule out SAS Canada hiring additional contractors, as jobs come up and the “consulting business continues to grow throughout the year.”
As of Friday, the company has posted seven of the new Canadian jobs on its careers site.
The growth of SAS Canada comes as the entire business analytics industry is thriving.
Research firm IDC Corp. predicts the business analytics market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7 per cent between 2009 and 2014, with even greater growth expected over the next 10 years.
“After three decades of existence, the business analytics market is finally reaching the mainstream market and gaining status as a formal management discipline,” said Dan Vesset, program vice-president for IDC’s business analytics solutions research.
Fueling interest in business analytics is the explosion of digital data, ripe for exploiting.
Data is growing in enterprise storage banks at a rate of 50 per cent per year, according to Dell’Oro Group Inc.
Further, IBM Corp. estimates that 80 per cent of data growth is unstructured — such as data from blogs, e-mail, podcasts, customer comments and videos — and will require effort to understand and analyze. Big Blue has gone all-in with business analytics, investing US$14 billion over the past five years to acquire a couple dozen analytics companies.
– With files from Ann Bednarz, NetworkWorld U.S.
