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Business analytics leader SAS continued its unbroken chain of growth in 2008, logging global revenue of US$2.26 billion, up 5.1 percent over 2007 results.
"We achieved our 33rd year of revenue growth in the worst economy most can remember," said CEO Jim Goodnight. "This growth is a direct result of being a stable privately held company, which allows us to invest in long-term relationships with employees and customers."
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Software giant SAS will build a new $70 million, 38,000-square-foot facility at its Cary campus in an effort to keep up with growing demand for so-called cloud computing services.
Privately held SAS said Thursday that the building will host two server farms that will power the company's OnDemand technology. Customers access the services over the Internet instead of downloading the programs to their computers, a la Web mail services such as Gmail or Hotmail.
"This project is proof that, despite the down economy, SAS continues to grow and innovate," Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, said in a written statement. "The growing demand by our customers for hosted solutions has given us this opportunity to invest even further in North Carolina and the Cary community."
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The head of each agency that expends more than $10,000,000 in a fiscal year on scientific education and outreach shall use at least 2 percent of such funds for the collaboration on the development and implementation of open source materials as an educational outreach effort… There are authorized to be appropriated $15,000,000 to carry out this section for fiscal year 2010 and such sums as necessary for each succeeding fiscal year.
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To ensure that the work on such a project is open, transparent and complete, we feel strongly that any "manifesto" should be created, from its inception, through an open mechanism like a Wiki, for public debate and comment, all available through a Creative Commons license. After all, what we are really seeking are ideas that have been broadly developed, meet a test of open, logical review and reflect principles on which the broad community agrees. This would help avoid biases toward one technology over another, and expand the opportunities for innovation.
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Microsoft’s Senior Director of Development Platform Management Steven Martin said he is not at liberty to comment on any of these questions. He referred me to his blog post from March 25. In that post, Martin said:
“We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto. What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience. Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed ‘as is,’ without modifications or additional input. It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an “open” process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.”
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Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure.