I used to visit the SAS campus when I lived in Raleigh. A beautiful place:

At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege
A TOUR of its carefully tended, 300-acre corporate campus here leaves little doubt why surveys, year after year, rate the SAS Institute, the world's largest private software company, among the best places to work.

There is the subsidized day care and preschool. There are the four company doctors and the dozen nurses who provide free primary care. The recreational amenities include basketball and racquetball courts, a swimming pool, exercise rooms and 40 miles of running and biking trails. There is a meditation garden, as well as on-site haircuts, manicures, and jewelry repair. Employees are encouraged to work 35-hour weeks.

Academics have studied the company's benefit-enhanced corporate culture as a model for nurturing creativity and loyalty among engineers and other workers. Six years ago, in a report on "60 Minutes," Morley Safer called working at SAS "the good life."

But that good life is under threat today as never before. SAS's specialty, a lucrative niche called business intelligence software, is becoming mainstream. Free, open-source alternatives to some of the company's products are increasingly popular. On the other end of the spectrum, the heavyweights of the software industry - Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and, especially, I.B.M. - are plunging in and investing billions of dollars.

"It will be a dogfight," says Bill Hostmann, an analyst at Gartner. "SAS has never faced a competitor like I.B.M. And I do think I.B.M. sees SAS as a big, fatted cow."

The term "business intelligence software" applies to a wide range of products and services, but all the technology is aimed at helping businesses mine nuggets of insight from mountains of data. SAS has traditionally specialized in advanced software to analyze huge data sets and to generate predictive statistical models for large corporations and government agencies.

Credit card companies, for example, use SAS to detect unusual buying patterns in real time, and to spot potentially fraudulent charges. Giant retail chains use SAS to tailor pricing and product offerings down to the store level. Telecommunications companies use SAS to identify the few thousand customers, among millions, most likely to switch to another cellphone carrier, and to aim marketing at them. SAS software is also used to parse sensor signals from North Sea oil rigs, combined with weather and structural data, to predict failure of parts before it happens. Of the 100 largest companies worldwide, 92 use SAS software...

Source: NY Times

...everyone appreciates the brutal efficiency of Schumpeterian creative destruction, until it's their rice bowl being broken...