Business Expansion in the Triangle

R-Dub · July 12, 2021, 1:03am

Of course CNBC talks about it.

atl_transplant · July 12, 2021, 5:01pm

Not sure if this would end up “expansion” but Broadcom out of California is looking to acquire SAS for up to 20 billion

https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2021/07/12/broadcom-in-reported-talks-to-acquire-carys-sas.html?ana=e_trig_bn_breakingnews_breakingnews&j=90565443&t=Breaking%20News&mkt_tok=NjczLVVXWS0yMjkAAAF-Oo2gbp1evWTg819FQ28r4SwZz_6gjvCkiLigeHw44UfwNKnhEffWDk5WDvtv53Mn_lj6bSSDqyPJ4lEhtKm2GibWmDtuIFn5Js0yzFdFE8ABRbhnHuU

pBeez · July 12, 2021, 5:11pm

I would very much hate for ownership of SAS to pass out of local hands.

atl_transplant · July 12, 2021, 7:24pm

Google eyeing ATC expansion for their permanent home.

https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2021/07/12/google-eyeing-american-tobacco-campus-expansion.html?utm_source=st&utm_medium=en&utm_campaign=ae&utm_content=ra&ana=e_ra_ae&j=24430625&senddate=2021-07-12

ventureConsult · July 12, 2021, 8:34pm

For a $3B a year software company, $15B is about as bottom barrel price as it gets. This just shows how much trouble SAS is in. They couldn’t transition into the cloud and couldn’t change fast enough to compete with offerings from Amazon, Spark, Google…etc. Sad, but they’re gonna be synonymous with CA Technologies. Definitely not good news here.

R-Dub · July 12, 2021, 8:48pm

I agree with you. I have some good friends that have been there a long time that have recently left.

NoRaAintAllBad · July 12, 2021, 8:58pm

Is that a downtown rendering with a Cinema, I see…!?
Oh, bother…just not the right one…

scotchman · July 13, 2021, 1:30pm

Would this be the type of company that developers of 506 Capital Blvd are looking for ? Had not heard of them before, guess kind of flying under radar locally being seems to be spread out around world.

ttps://www.wraltechwire.com/2021/07/13/raleighs-insightsoftware-lands-whopping-800m-investment-from-global-investor/

mike · July 13, 2021, 2:13pm

Interesting thought. Looks like they are in the Forum office campus in North Raleigh right now. (Owned by Highwoods… best case scenario Highwoods builds them a new tower at their warehouse district site?)

John · July 13, 2021, 2:24pm

Better yet, maybe they light a fire under their landlord (Highwoods) to get off their butts and build downtown. Of course, we are making a lot of presumptions about Insightsoftware wanting to be downtown.

Mitch · July 13, 2021, 3:08pm

These both line up with the impression I’ve gotten from friends who had been there a long time but also just recently left. SAS has been struggling to adapt and they’ve recently been hemorrhaging workers.

ExSF · July 13, 2021, 5:05pm

I left about 3 years ago and now some of my former colleagues are flying the coop. It’s also tough to compete when some of your competitors are free open-source software.

Kanatenah · July 13, 2021, 5:26pm

what exactly do they do? I know business software, but that could be just about anything.

ventureConsult · July 13, 2021, 5:32pm

I think that’s essentially the issue. SAS ran on an old software license business model and never adapted, when newer competitors are either free or running consumption based models in the cloud. Some large enterprises and governments will continue to use SAS as they are entrenched and need the complex stat features SAS offers, but that doesn’t apply to 90% of the use cases out there. They basically completely missed out on a paradigm shift. That’s usually bad news in tech.

keita · July 13, 2021, 5:36pm

SAS mainly makes software for statistical analysis. They try to make things sound fancy with AI and cloud computing, but their bread and butter is still a program where you put data in and get out statistics, graphs, forecasts etc. -whether it’s for business modeling, healthcare research, marketing predictions, or something else entirely.

@ventureConsult pretty much hit the nail on the head for why SAS is less and less relevant nowadays, though. Besides other enterprise-level competitors like IBM’s SPSS, there are tons of free (but still scalable) solutions out there like the R or Python programming languages (and associated packages). It doesn’t help that those are much easier to use than SAS, too, if you ask me.

ExSF · July 13, 2021, 6:58pm

Basically, statistical analysis software. Branched into many different areas, but that’s the heart of it. The were early in the market and grew phenomenally fast for many years. They have a large entrenched customer base too. I think SAS is viewed as having powerful software but expensive and difficult to implement and maintain.

Deekay93 · July 13, 2021, 8:53pm

I’ve got a family member that works at SAS. Goodnight just sent out a company wide email that SAS is “not for sale” and it’s all just speculation.

R-Dub · July 13, 2021, 8:55pm

And with a little bitterness, I will tell you that they pissed a lot of customers off with their extremely high annual maintenance costs. It’s been a while since I was in that role (and my company has since ridded our environment of their tools), but years ago their annual costs were in the 40 percent range vs 15-20 of most software vendors. And you had to renew or no keys!

ExSF · July 13, 2021, 9:04pm

Figured he’d have to make some sort of statement.

OakCityDylan · July 13, 2021, 9:06pm

And if he’s talking to anyone about selling, his statement should be that they aren’t for sale. You don’t want to bleed more employees than you already are.