SAS Institute to buy ABC Technologies Inc.

SAS Institute Inc. of Cary, N.C., announced March 6 that it would acquire ABC Technologies Inc. of Beaverton, Ore. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ABC Technologies will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SAS. Its employees will be offered jobs with SAS.

ABC, a provider of activity-based analytic management software, had 2001 revenue of $32 million. Its public-sector customers include the Army and Marine Corps, Canadian National Defense, United Nations Development Programme and state and local governments. The company has offices in 15 countries.

The acquisition will combine SAS' performance management technology with ABC Technologies' activity-based financial management and score-carding expertise for enterprise intelligence, SAS said in a statement. SAS' business intelligence software and services are used at more than 38,000 sites. SAS had 2001 revenue of $1.13 billion.

"Last year we announced a strategy to acquire technology that complements our solutions," said Jim Goodnight, SAS president and chief executive officer. "By integrating the ABC team into SAS, we will become bigger and better. Our combined solution will provide our customers with a breadth of applications that other vendors in the space can't match."

The transaction follows an 18-month collaboration between SAS and ABC Technologies on the XML-based standard for score-carding applications. When the acquisition is complete, Chris Pieper, CEO of ABC Technologies, will become president of SAS' Active Performance Management program.

ABC Technologies employs 225 people, including 123 in Beaverton. It has more than 4,300 software installations in 73 countries with customers in the public sector, manufacturing, services and consumer goods. Its client base of midsize and global 1,000 organizations will complement the SAS client base, which is primarily comprised of large companies, SAS said.

ABC's Beaverton office will become a large SAS operation, said SAS spokeswoman Bobbi Harris. SAS will keep ABC's foreign offices open to reach the firm's customers, except where the operations overlap with SAS foreign offices, she said.

As part of the deal, SAS will also acquire the knowledge portal BetterManagement.com, a subsidiary of ABC Technologies. The performance management Web portal aggregates content on performance measurement, profitability analysis, cost management, business process planning and value chain collaboration for use by 50,000 members.

The acquisition is subject to the approval of ABC Technologies' shareholders.