Briefs

By Timothy Prickett Morgan, 20th March 2009

Business-analytics software developer SAS Institute is taking to the clouds. But rather than stake the future of its hosted-application business on existing clouds such as Amazon AWS, SAS has decided to shell out $70m (�48m) to build its own cloud-computing facility.

The Cary, North Carolina software house has seen exponential growth since its founding in 1976. Although privately held and thus not obligated to provide any financials, the company posted sales of $2.26bn (�1.56bn) in 2008 and invested a staggering 22 per cent of revenue in research and development.

...

The SAS OnDemand apps include applications to detect money laundering, to drive drug discovery (in the lab, not at the airport), and to perform marketing analysis on various fronts.

SAS thinks it's on to something, but it wants to build a more cloud-like facility than its current Solaris farm. Collins says that for the past four years the development side of SAS has been a heavy user of server-virtualization tools from VMware, using the ESX Server hypervisor and related staging tools for development and test environments.

Read more.