PUNE: SAS - the business intelligence software and services company has announced plans to expand its SAS Global Services (SGS) operations in India. SAS plans to increase the R&D strength in Pune from the current 50 to 100 in 2004. Addressing a press conference, SAS Inc. senior VP and CTO Keith Collins said that while the company is doubling the capacity now, it has plans to double it further next year. This would make it single largest R & D facility outside USA.

SAS has R&D facilities in Tokyo, Heidelberg, Denmark and Japan. The Pune R&D center is working on various analytical solutions that leverage Java expertise and on industry focused solutions. The company that boasted of an 11,000 sq feet facility added another 11,000 sq feet today to accommodate around 120 odd engineers. "The Pune operations are indicative of SAS' larger, ongoing effort to remain an R&D driven software company. While many vendors have flattened or reduced spending on R&D, SAS has maintained its annual reinvestment of more than 25 percent of revenue back into product research and development. After the successful creation of a business intelligence solution from India in telecom vertical, the Indian team is now engaged in developing similar vertical solutions for the banking, insurance, retail and manufacturing sector," Collins added.

According to Collins, banking and finance is currently the biggest vertical for the company accounting with 35 percent revenues coming from financial services. The company has already sold solutions to ICICI, IDBI Bank and Citibank among others. The IT services sector is the second largest for the company accounting for 16 percent revenues.

SAS recently acquired Marketmax - a provider of advanced retail planning and merchandise intelligence software. According to the company, the acquisition accelerates its aggressive strategy to lead the market in retail intelligence applications that meet the analytic, planning, forecasting and optimization needs of this industry. Collins believed that this would pick up aggressively next year.

The company has also come up with a ‘warranty analysis solution' for the manufacturing sector and hopes to close in a few decisions by the end of this year. The solution allows an organization to identify questionable warranty claims to detect fraudulent activities and take note of emerging issues before they become critical.

It collects and manages the data from disparate sources and organizes it for process modeling, data mining and detailed data analysis. Collins hoped that this market would pick up by 2005.

The company is also exploring the possibilities of working in the government sector through a partner. "We are currently in the midst of serious discussions with TCS and Tata Infotech. We hope that our partners would lead us into this segment sometime next year," informed SAS India Pvt Ltd CEO and MD, Vivek Gokarn. Currently, SAS has reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in revenues in India.

CyberMedia News Service)