SAS buys Assetlink of California

Editor's Note: An article Wednesday about SAS' acquisition of software company Assetlink incorrectly reported where Assetlink is based. Assetlink's headquarters is in Pleasanton, Calif.

Analytics software giant SAS has acquired a California software company in an effort to beef up its corporate marketing software.

Assetlink is a pioneer in resource management software that helps companies improve their marketing operations. The company, founded in 1997, has 60 employees.

Cary-based SAS didn't disclose the price it paid for Asset link.

"It's quite a hot area," said David M. Raab of Raab Associates, a marketing technology consulting firm in Chappaqua, N.Y. "It's driven by the growth of Web marketing, which means that you simply have more things going on, more messages [going] out. Marketing has become more complicated, so you need a better administrative infrastructure to handle it."

Assetlink's software "helps companies better understand their marketing spend, better plan their product launches, better organize their marketing assets," said Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS.

Under a previous marketing relationship between the two companies, SAS already has integrated some of Assetlink's features with its business analytics software so that companies can understand what marketing efforts are working and which need improvement. The acquisition enables SAS to do even more, Davis said.

"We will add staff, particularly in the R&D area, to enhance the integration as well as add functionality," he said.

Corporations and other customers use SAS business intelligence and analytics software to analyze their operations and predict trends.

Privately held SAS is one of the largest companies based in the Triangle, and it has more than 11,500 workers worldwide, including more than 4,650 in Cary. Last year SAS' revenue rose 5.2 percent to a record $2.43 billion.

The acquisition of Assetlink is "a perfectly good match," Raab said. "Assetlink is a real good company and SAS is a strong vendor in the space."

Raab noted that SAS competitors IBM and Teradata previously acquired marketing resource management companies of their own, making SAS's acquisition somewhat of a foregone conclusion.

"It was like there were only two people left in the room, and they were kind of looking at each other and saying, well, the prom is next week [and] I guess we have to go with each other if we want to go to the party," he said.

But Davis said there was nothing defensive about the acquisition, saying instead that it was a logical next step in the relationship between the two companies.

SAS, he added, already has "the broadest suite [of products] in the customer intelligence space today."

Even after the Assetlink acquisition, SAS has more than $1 billion in cash that it could use to purchase other companies.