SAS employees have traditionally seemed content to keep to themselves. Recruiting tech talent is more difficult than ever, despite SAS's reputation as benevolent employer. In recent years, some longtime employees and potential recruits have been lured away by startups and rival companies dangling stock options that as a private company, SAS doesn't offer. Meanwhile, as sales cycles speed up, SAS's quiet approach has occasionally put it at a disadvantage. Goodnight complains that SAS is often missing from Wall Street analysts' reports, because it lies below the radar as a private company.
Headlines are hard to come by, too, because the company has no story to sell the nation's investors.
Managing the company has also become unwieldy for one person. He and Goodnight met in 1999 at a venture capital conference in the Triangle. He also was a business development and marketing executive for Wang Laboratories, Cognos, Oracle, and Seer Technologies, and held management jobs at IBM from 1976 to 1989. He and Goodnight talked off and on for about a year before Boisvert agreed to join SAS as a strategic adviser in February 2000. His appointment as president was announced Sept. 15.