The UK arm of SAS Institute Inc, Cary, North Carolina has announced turnover for the year to November 30 1988 of UKP6.1m, up 32% from the UKP4.6m it reported in 1987. Corporate turnover, comprising Europe, North America and the Asia/Pacific region rose by 24% to $170.4m, up from $135.3m last year. Notably, combined turnover for the company’s nine European subsidiaries and two distributors, which saw an annual growth rate of 34%, totalled $45.2m, some 25% of SAS’ total turnover. Art Cooke, the head of European operations, identifies three major factors behind the European figures, which were well above target. First is the addition of 240 new mainframe sites to the com-pany’s installed base of SAS System users. The SAS System is applications generation environment, used to develop applications, manage and analyse data, and generate reports. Second comes 180 new DEC VAX sites, marking a definite shift away from the company’s traditional IBM mainframe targets. This increase is put down to the mid-year arrival of products designed to integrate with DEC’s RdB and All-in-One software, and the release of the faster, more VAXoriented Version 5.16 SAS System for VAX. Third was the addition of 500 new organisations to the company’s MS-DOS micro user base. Primary spurs cited by Cooke include the launch of Versions 6.03 of SAS’ SAS/AF and SAS/FSP software in the first quarter, and the release of SAS/Assist in the autumn. In the UK, the Marlowbased company says it licensed the SAS System for mainframes, minis and MS-DOS micros at just under 200 new sites. Significantly, the UK subsidiary doubled its representation in the VAX market, and contributed 60 of the 180 new VAX site sales made in Europe. At the low end, SAS Software Ltd cl-aims that Version 6.03 of its SAS System for MS-DOS micros doubled in user terms to reach 5,500 by the end of the year. As regards mainframes, the comp-any claims that SAS System is used as a standard performance evaluation tool in over 70% of the UK’s MVS sites. Overall, new sales in the UK rose by 25% in value terms, and by 45% in volume terms.
