By Bob Meyer

Sixty-three year old Jim Goodnight owns two-thirds of SAS (for Statistical Analysis System). A company that has 6.5 million lines of code, and is the imposing program used by the United States Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture.

A customer can integrate and organize massive amounts of data that are stored in incompatible computers—IBM mainframes, PCs, Macintoshes, et cetera—and then view and mine the data on virtually any computer platform.

With the click of a mouse, customers can break down data and test up to 16,000 variables.

Goodnight was an under-graduate applied-mathematics major at North Carolina State University. He spent a year with General Electric working on the Apollo space program before receiving his doctorate in statistics. He then joined the faculty at his alma mater.

But it was a “soft money’ appointment, meaning Goodnight had to bring in enough outside funding to cover his salary and research that got him thinking creatively.

At the same time he teamed with a fellow university researcher who had worked two years at IBM developing the Pentagon’s information system. But he saw an enormous brain-power waste in having to write a new program each time they wanted to analyze data.

Goodnight decided to develop, with his fellow researcher, a uniform program that could be used over and over. One that could solve lots of different kinds of problems.

With their grant money running low, his new working program was developed, and Goodnight and friend decided to strike out on their own.

They approached North Carolina State and proposed a trade—give them all copyrights on the SAS program in exchange for free upgrades. Goodnight says, “They didn’t know what software was, so they didn’t know how to control it.”

Thus another entrepreneurial success story. And another creative use of barter, which enabled Goodnight to join the ranks of the Forbes 500—as he’s now worth an estimated $3 billion!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Best & Brightest Barter, Marketing, Purchasing & Financing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.