Company
News
SAS Institute Celebrates A
"Three-peat"
For 2nd Year in a Row, Institute 3rd on FORTUNE magazine's List of 100 Best
Companies to Work for in America
CARY, NC (December 21, 1998) -- Employees at Cary-based SAS Institute
Inc. are celebrating the Institute's number three ranking in FORTUNE's second annual list
of the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America." The Institute was the
highest-ranked of eighteen high-tech companies on the list and the only North
Carolina-based company included. SAS Institute was also ranked third in last year’s
FORTUNE list.
The company, led by co-founder and CEO Dr. James H. Goodnight, has long been known for
treating its employees well and focusing on work-life issues. In turn, employees are loyal
to the company as demonstrated by an annual turnover rate of less than 4% in an industry
segment where employee turnover rates of 20% are not uncommon.
"This all makes sound business sense for us,"” said Goodnight.
"Employee loyalty helps us provide better software and services, and that has helped
us achieve a strong sense of customer loyalty over the years." Ninety-eight percent
of the company’s customers renew their annual licenses every year.
The list, which appears in the January 11 issue of FORTUNE, was compiled through
extensive research, analysis and a poll of more than 27,000 employees at hundreds of
companies worldwide. FORTUNE collaborated with best-selling authors Robert Levering and
Milton Moskowitz to compile the list, using methodology similar to that used for their
books, "The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America."
To be eligible, a company had to be at least ten years old and have a minimum of 500
employees. Each candidate company distributed to 225 randomly selected employees the Great
Place to Work Trust Index, an employee survey designed to evaluate trust in management,
pride in work/company, and camaraderie. Levering and Moskowitz, who have been tracking the
most beloved employers since 1981, searched their database of more than 1,000 companies
and selected 295 as the most viable candidates for this list.
Employees of the selected companies completed the Great Place to Work Trust Index
designed to evaluate trust in management, pride in work and camaraderie, along with the
Hewitt People Practices Inventory, a 31-page questionnaire developed by Hewitt Associates,
a management consulting firm. Candidates were rated on a 176-point scale, based on
responses from the employee survey, the written comments, the Inventory questionnaire and
the supporting materials.
Now in its 22nd year, SAS Institute
is one of the top ten largest independent software vendors in the world, and is the
largest privately held software company. The leading provider of data warehousing and
decision-support software, the Institute has won the reader-selected 1996 and 1997 Datamation
magazine Data Warehousing
Product of the Year award and Software Magazine's Editor's Choice award for
decision-support software.
SAS Institute provides an integrated suite of information delivery tools that allow
companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organization into information
that business users need to make decisions. To make data useful, SAS software collects
data from almost every platform and data format; cleans and transforms data into
information that users will understand; and stores that information in an open and
efficient data warehouse structure. To explore that information, SAS software includes OLAP, query and
reporting, EIS, data mining, analysis, data visualization, and application-development
interfaces. SAS software is client/server and Web enabled. SAS Institute also delivers
business solutions for financial consolidation and reporting, clinical trials analysis,
oil and gas analysis and IT service management. Currently, SAS software and business
solutions are being used at more than 30,000 business, government, and university sites in
more than 120 countries.
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