But for the second time in three months, the Cary software company is explaining itself in the wake of a restructuring that has already affected 72 employees and will affect dozens more.

On Tuesday, SAS notified fewer than 100 marketing employees that their jobs would be eliminated. All will be given a chance to apply for other jobs at SAS. The move follows a similar reduction of 72 sales positions in May.

Creating the upheaval has been the consolidation of SAS' two sales and marketing organizations in the Americas. The leaders of both groups left the company this spring, and SAS took that opportunity to re-evaluate the operations, said Jim Davis, the company's chief marketing officer.

SAS first decided to eliminate its sales by phone, opting instead to put salespeople out in the field. Only three of the people whose jobs were eliminated couldn't find new positions within SAS, and 13 others decided to retire or take severance packages, spokeswoman Pamela Meek said.

Davis said he hopes the employees notified Tuesday will have similar success. In this case, SAS is eliminating redundancies caused by the consolidation of the two marketing groups.

SAS is retooling its divisions in response to new challenges it faces in the highly competitive market for business intelligence software. Changes in the way that customers run SAS' statistical and analytical software are forcing some adjustments by the company, while lower-cost competition is eating up market share, as well.

And that means SAS is having to act more like its publicly-held competitors, examining its strategy, shuffling employees and making sure it's as focused as possible. "We're doing constant realignments in our business," Davis said.

He admitted the restructuring of sales and marketing has generated more employment volatility at SAS in 2006 than in years past, but he made a distinction between SAS' activity and the "rolling layoffs" he sees at other Triangle technology companies.

The goal isn't to cut SAS' head count; it is to improve the company's operating efficiency, reduce duplication and ensure employees' skills fit its strategy, Davis said.

SAS has added a net of 99 jobs in the United States this year and plans to end the year with more employees than when it started, overall and in Cary.

"It's not a numbers game here," he said. "We're a healthy organization."

The company's new sales grew 21.4 percent in the first half of 2006, fueled by new customers such as BASF, Netflix and Citibank. SAS looks at new sales as a measure of the acceptance of its more recent industry-focused products in the marketplace. Overall revenue, based on new sales and renewals, is growing by more than 10 percent a year, Davis said.

SAS has 4,228 employees in Cary and 10,110 globally. Davis estimated that 60 percent to 70 percent of the affected salespeople and 70 percent to 80 percent of the marketing employees were based at its headquarters in Cary.

At 4.9 percent, SAS' turnover is still far lower than the industry average, and also lower than SAS' rate during the past two years, spokeswoman Pamela Meek said.

The marketing employees will remain on SAS' payroll until Sept. 15, and the company will hold an internal job fair for them next week. SAS has 108 openings and expects to add another 67. Although most are based in Cary, not all are in sales.

SAS currently has no plans for more realignments, Meek said, and the sales and marketing reorganization is finished.

"I asked [CEO Jim Goodnight] flat out, 'Are we done with this?' " Davis said. "We're done with this. We did what we needed to do."