Who Owns SAS?

The software began in the late 1960s at North Carolina State University, where a grant-funded project built statistical routines to analyze agricultural research data. James Goodnight, John Sall, Anthony James Barr, and Jane Helwig were the core developers. The name stood for Statistical Analysis System.

When university funding ended, the four spun the work into a company on July 1, 1976, launching with four employees and roughly 300,000 lines of code. The first product, BASE SAS, gave researchers and statisticians a language and toolkit for data analysis on mainframes.

Through the 1980s and 1990s SAS expanded from a statistical package into a platform covering data management, reporting, and industry solutions. Banks adopted it for risk and fraud work, pharmaceutical companies for clinical trial analysis, and governments for everything from tax auditing to census processing.

The company never took outside money. Profits funded the Cary campus expansion, which grew into a 900-acre headquarters with on-site childcare, healthcare, and the benefits programs that made SAS a fixture on best-employer lists.

The 2010s brought the platform rebuild: SAS Viya, a cloud-native, in-memory analytics architecture, launched in 2016 and steadily replaced the legacy SAS 9 stack. In July 2021 Goodnight announced IPO preparations, but the timeline slipped past the expected 2025 window, and in 2026 the company said "public readiness" was the real objective.

SAS turned 50 in 2026. Its annual report marked the milestone with more than $3 billion in sales, 20% growth in Viya sales, and a sixth consecutive year of double-digit cloud growth.