Intelligent Enterprise

The Register has a fairly detailed article about SAS expanding its cloud/SaaS offerings. I disagree with one part, namely:

I fail to see why SAS's campus would be better than leading hosting companies' data centers for either data privacy/security or data upload speed. Rather, I think major reasons for SAS building its own data center for cloud computing probably focus on:

• Choice of hardware. SAS works hard with hardware engineers to optimize its software for specific platforms. Also, last I looked, it was still pretty SMP-oriented, SAS's deal with Teradata notwithstanding, but that speaks more against the Amazon cloud than it does against some of the more classic SaaS hosts.
  
  
• Why not? (Part 1) Yes, bigger SaaS vendors than SAS have chosen to outsource their hosting, notably Salesforce.com. Still, SAS's effort seems big enough to get reasonable economies of scale.

• Why not? (Part 2) To the extent SAS finds hosting difficult — well, even that's a benefit. It informs the development operation what it needs to do to make the software more manageable. True, Oracle, SAP et al. don't seem persuaded by similar reasoning — but SAS has always marched to the beat of its own drum.

• Return to its roots. Unless I'm terribly mistaken, SAS started out in the 1970s as a time-sharing vendor just as Information Builders did. (And unlike IBI, SAS has never gotten away from focusing o recurring revenue.)

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