Since this chapter introduces various SAS products, I begin by talking about SAS itself as a company and a leader in the world of analytics.

Jim Goodnight, Jim Barr, Jane Helwig, and John Sall founded SAS in 1976 after a decade of statistical product development as a North Carolina State University project. After four decades of rapid growth, SAS commands a place at the top of the business analytics market, offering a wide suite of outstanding software, agile solutions at the cutting edge of technology, and constant improvement. Currently, SAS serves some 75,000 organizations across 139 countries, including 93 of the top 100 companies on the 2014 Fortune Global 500®. In 2014 SAS enjoyed revenues of US$3.09 billion.

Foremost in the arsenal of SAS is its product recognition. SAS software is consistently recognized as leading the market in various areas. Industry research that compares companies for competitive position consistently places SAS as foremost in various areas (for example, as of 2015, the various Forrester Wave^TM reports at www.forrester.com, the Gartner Group “Magic Quadrant” reports at http://www.gartner.com/technology/home.jsp, and many others). SAS pairs its excellence in core software with a major publishing arm and a vibrant training and educational arm offering highly desirable courses and certifications.

From a learner’s point of view, SAS’s position in the world of employment is of interest. SAS skills are a major addition to employability. Recent research by PayScale.com showed that SAS is the number 1 keyword that adds additional salary value in a job advert across all types of jobs (data analyst roles including the competency SAS paid 17% higher than those that did not, Pfeuffer, 2015). In a similar vein, Indeed.com, a major repository of job postings, recently placed SAS as the second most important programming language keywords for job advertisements behind Java (therefore number 1 among specialist statistics packages, Muenchen, 2015).

One of the ways SAS has maintained its massive market presence is to be an employer of choice. At last official count, SAS employed 13,811 highly skilled employees worldwide. In the United States, Fortune magazine has named SAS as one of its "100 Best Companies to Work For" every year since 1998, and SAS was awarded top employer in this list to work for in 2010 and 2011. Similar top employer status has been achieved in many other surveys and territories worldwide (see https://www.sas.com/en_za/news/press-releases.html).

The premier position of SAS in the world of analytics suggests that investing in its technologies is well worth the effort of the beginner reading this book. The rest of this chapter, therefore, gets us started on this journey.