As large as the privately-held SAS is ($2.15 billion in revenue in 2007) and as great a place as they are to work (always among the lowest turnover rates in any industry and voted among best places to work by everyone), I had to hesitate before including them here - which might seem a little churlish. This is a company whose revenue went up 15% last year, more driven by partners than ever before. They increased their customer base by 1,100 - a great number. They consistently hit the quadrants in the Business Intelligence and in the Multichannel Campaign Management category as a leader, according to Gartner. So that would seem to be amazing right? But I still had to hesitate - though here they are. They To get into this list, I have to think that a company is going to play big time in 2009, and as much as I like these guys, I’m not 100% sure of that. But I am convinced enough to make them a tenuous choice. To their credit, They have three distinguished CRMish applications that are clearly excellent - their Marketing Automation application, which, while headlined by Campaign Management, is much larger than that. It additionally includes Marketing Mix Management (this is the former Veridiem, which had an office in an old warehouse with amazingly high ceilings in the Boston area, many moons ago) Marketing Performance Management, Web Analytics and a host of others; their Customer Experience Analytics are smart and capable While not terribly pretty, the interface is more than serviceable. They even have a whole series of products including marketing automation, marketing mix management and business intelligence that they offer on demand. They have staff members who are both incredibly smart and incredibly personable. Some of the more “radical” among them are making prodigious and good use of social tools like Twitter & Facebook for more than personal reasons - and doing their company a service. They have Better Management.com, a well organized highly practical site with “what to do’s” everywhere including a Web TV show called Better Management Today that I’ve happily appeared on twice. But I have this nagging problem that I’ve had for years with them. I have heard for years that they are changing their marketing approach and positioning to suit the actual marketplace and not the imagined one they have - which seems to be one left over from William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” of the 1950s and maybe the early 60s. Watch Madmen on AMC if you’re not old enough to remember the era. I just don’t see the necessary changes in their marketing strategy or even creative work. About two years ago, I was in a meeting at SAS where I saw a highly original & creative product of planned changes to their marketing which only got crushed up the chain somewhere. This year I didn’t see anything that told me that they’re fully adopting to contemporary marketing requirements - which, when it comes to a technology company riding a wave that the customers control, can become a serious problem. That said, they still are a company that operates on the strength of its products and the viability of its environment - and for that alone, they make the list - this year.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
