The sales of SAS Software (Thailand) have grown by more than 50 per cent in each of two recent consecutive quarters.
Now, eight months after his appointment, managing director Taveesak Saengthong is aiming to more than triple the business and the workforce of the business-analytics company within the next three years.
Taveesak was previously country manager for Hitachi Data Systems Thailand's data storage solutions. He joined the local unit of SAS Software last October. Despite the lingering effects of the global economic crisis and domestic political upheaval, the software house, under Taveesak's stewardship, achieved year-on-year sales growth of 56 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 86 per cent in the first quarter of this year.
Speaking to The Nation last week, Taveesak said SAS Software had been far from utilising its full potential and should be able to expand its business and workforce by more than three times over the next three years.
He said SAS had 150 employees in the Philippines, compared with a staff of only 42 in Thailand.
"For us to grow to more than 150 staff should be possible within three years," he said, adding that the company planned to increase its workforce to 60 by the end of this year.
Global sales amounting to US$2.3 billion (Bt74.6 billion) last year showed that SAS's technologies were very influential in the conduct of many businesses worldwide. However, the firm and its solutions are not as well known in Thailand. Therefore, building up awareness of SAS among local organisations and showing them how they can benefit from the company's offerings will be one of Taveesak's prime points of focus.
SAS's three major products groups are customer intelligence, risk intelligence and business-analytics frameworks. Taveesak said Tops Supermarkets and most mobile-phone operators were among the local customers for SAS's customer-intelligence products. These had helped them to analyse and learn their customers' behaviour, enabling them to offer relevant and timely products and services, while optimising their product placements and inventories.
Financial institutions and the Thai Credit Bureau are among the clients for SAS's risk-intelligence solutions, which are attracting more interest among local businesses because of the recent violent protests in Bangkok, he said.
The business-analytics framework, meanwhile, has been used by many government agencies that apply so-called "executive dashboards" to measure key-performance indices. The project was dubbed "Ministry Operation Centres" during the tenure of the Thaksin government.
SAS has recently been contacted by a local political party that is interested in using its social-media analytics solutions to monitor public opinion on online communities.
Taveesak said that this tool, although largely limited to Bangkok and the higher-income section of the population that used websites intensively, was much more accurate than market surveys or polls.
"You can check who's more popular between 'Kai Oo' [military spokesman Colonel Sansern Kaewkamnerd] or [movie star] Ken Theeradeth. Or we can tell which BlackBerry models are the most talked-about and thus we can rechannel our money for holding events and advertisements to different models," he said.
SAS also has an anti-fraud framework that governments, tax offices and banks can use to detect fraudulent behaviour as well as terrorist-funding sources.
Taveesak said many local customers still did not know that SAS offered "on-demand" or "Software-as-a-Service" solutions. The company also aims to promote its warranty-analysis solutions among manufacturing clients.
Taveesak succeeded Kwanchai Lertchurushan, who left SAS to pursue his own businesses after spending five years in the post. Since the firm was set up in Thailand in 2001, SAS has had three managing directors - all of them Thais. Unlike many other software firms, SAS has a policy of appointing local chief executives in every country in which it operates, Taveesak said.
Worldwide, SAS has been riding the wave of intensifying interest in business-intelligence software. Gartner, an IT research firm, has predicted that business intelligence will be the hottest technology trend in 2010, leading social networking and cloud computing, which it placed second and third, respectively.
Meanwhile, informed sources say SAS has given a major boost to its aggressive sales drive with the recent appointment of Kasidit Kolasastraseni as sales director for the financial services industry and commercial sales. Kasidit was formerly vice president of leading cellular phone operator Total Access Communication (DTAC).
