BI users and vendors talk a lot about coming up with "a single version of the truth." For companies with global operations, what are the international-specific obstacles to attaining that single version? Most organizations are dropping back to database and ERP technology, which is giving them some problems. And those organizations aren"t flexible enough to be able to pick out the data from all these operations worldwide and bring it together into a warehouse. A lot of organizations don"t think it"s possible and will try to rationalize the operational systems underneath, rather than putting something like SAS on top of it to bring all that data together very quickly.
Many CIOs have been bitten so badly by these huge ERP implementations that they almost don"t want to touch it and almost don"t want to acknowledge that there"s an issue there, because it"s far too dangerous politically. One of the things we"re seeing in Europe now is people are starting to lose their jobs because of failed ERP implementations -- they continue to shovel money down that huge hole. We"ve got something out there from SAS that can actually do this (ERP consolidation) -- it"s possible. But one of the issues we have with IT is that because they"ve been bitten so badly before, people are shy about looking at these issues with an open mind and seeing you can do it in a matter of months.
What advice do you have for U.S. companies that need to expand their IT operations to locations overseas? What do they tend to overlook? They tend to make the same mistakes they make in the States: When they put new infrastructure in, they probably put parallel infrastructure in rather than looking for a more clever way of doing it. It may be possible to install much more efficient systems. And go for good local employees would be the other general advice I would have.
What sorts of IT talents and capabilities do you think tend to be stronger outside the U.S. than inside the U.S.? I think all these markets are pretty similar. IT is generally struggling with the same issues, whether you"re in Hong Kong or China or Australia or Russia.
How much software development does SAS do outside of the U.S., and is any of that offshore development outsourced? We don"t outsource anything -- all the development work is done in-house. We"re putting 25 percent of our revenues into R&D, which is quite different from everybody else -- that"s our bread and butter. The vast majority of the work is done in Cary; we have local language-adaptation centers in Japan and Beijing. We have 100 people in India who are doing a combination of vertical industry work and specific testing of particular modules of the core technology as well.
All the time we"re implementing things out in the field, the thing we"ve got to do to maintain our competitive advantage is to keep implementation times down to a minimum. We"re trying to bring the best of those implementations back and package them up. We"ve built this library of applications by industry -- banking, retail, telco, insurance -- where we"ve got all this knowledge.
How have political issues, specifically the war in Iraq, affected SAS"s global business? We missed a quarter last year -- Europe just stopped for a quarter. There was a lot of uncertainty about what was going to happen, so a lot of decision-making just ground to a halt. It"s been picking up ever since, but there was a definite (cutback) in Europe; less so in Asia, but also in Asia, it was noticeable.
What does SAS do well from a globalization perspective, and what does it need to do better? Any company that works at a global level needs to be looking for best practices wherever you find them. And that"s an ongoing search. Never believe that you own the truth -- always look for it wherever you might find it in your organization. That"s part of this theory of bringing what we"re doing out in the field back centrally so we can send it out again. That"s the thing we"re continuously trying to improve.