Three trending topics for business and IT – big data, analytics and the cloud – have contributed to the growth of revenue, staff and the Cary, NC campus of analytics software leader SAS. Today SAS opened a new building to house the SAS® Solutions OnDemand team. This group develops and supports SAS Cloud Analytics.

SAS Cloud Analytics provides customers with rapid access to analytics solutions, whether their data lives in their own cloud, the SAS Cloud or a partner cloud, such as Amazon Web Services. With more than 400 customers in 70 countries, SAS Cloud Analytics revenue is up 35 percent in 2014.

One customer is Dignity Health, one of the largest health systems in the United States. Dignity is working with SAS to build a cloud-based, big-data analytics platform to optimize patient treatment through better data analysis. Announced last month, the project aims to reduce re-admission rates, improve methods of addressing congestive heart failure and sepsis, manage pharmacy costs, and more.

“We’ve seen growth not just in cloud analytics, but in analytics as a whole. SAS owes its growth and success, in large part, to listening to our customers,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, addressing government officials and local media at the grand opening of the new, state-of-the-art facility, which features high-tech customer collaboration spaces. SAS has added nearly 1,000 jobs at its world headquarters in the last five years, counter to the downsizing trend.

Commitment to Innovation

Contributing to SAS’ continued growth is commitment to research and development. In the past year, SAS delivered 27 new data management and analytics products and released new features to another 160. SAS Visual Analytics, introduced two years ago, is now licensed at more than 2,600 customer sites. In the last year, SAS has aggressively brought to market advanced analytics software supporting customers’ growing use of the Hadoop big data framework. SAS customers can expect the company’s Hadoop portfolio to continue expanding. Such continued innovation around industry-leading solutions attracted 1,900 new customers to SAS in the past year.

Commitment to North Carolina

SAS is a global business, but remains deeply rooted in the Triangle. From Building Q’s design and construction to the work going on behind its walls, the latest addition to SAS headquarters showcases SAS’ commitment to North Carolina. Seventy percent of the contracting firms behind the building’s construction are North Carolina-based. More than half the artists whose work is displayed throughout the building live in the state.

Additionally, Building Q will house the growing SAS Analytics Lab for State and Local Government. “In 2011, we promised to add 100 highly qualified professionals dedicated to helping our state and local government customers. We did better – growing it another 90 percent by hiring 224 people in that area,” Goodnight said.

The lab’s work has supported life-altering discoveries globally and locally. Based on data analysis by the SAS Advanced Analytics Lab for State and Local Government, Wake County EMS recently changed its recommendations for how long to continue CPR on cardiac-arrest patients. One-hundred people who would have died under the previous guidelines are alive today because of the new standard.

Building Q was constructed with a focus on being environmentally conscious. Once certified, the building will be the fourth on SAS campus to be certified for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED), and the seventh SAS building worldwide to achieve this certification. Others are located in Canada, Sweden and Brazil.