SAS India business to grow faster than other markets, top executive says

The India business of data management and analytics company SAS is poised for a double-digit growth, which will be faster than any other region due to the AI boom, a senior company executive said.


“India as a market is one of the top two or three biggest offices outside of the US. We have always invested heavily here and been here for 26 years. It's always grown at double digit for the last few years now,” Gydien said.


The company is particularly bullish on the government sector after having acquired customers such as the Maharashtra Sales Tax Department, Odisha Mining Corporation and the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation, he said.

“Government is becoming a very big area for us. In fact, in the last couple of years it has actually outstripped our performance in financial services.”

Gydien said despite being price-sensitive, Indian organisations have an appetite to absorb the increase in cost of services to adopt and build AI-first applications.

“The way our price has changed, we have made sure it is relevant to the market,” he said.

The data management firm is responsible for integrating generative AI capabilities into core business processes and automating actions throughout the value chain.

“Making sure that there's sound data being leveraged as part of that training the large language model is critical. There's a debate around human in the loop and human out of the loop. We tend to lean more towards having a human in the loop at some point, particularly depending on the context of usage,” Gydien said.

SAS’s platform also plays a critical role in implementing the digital data protection law for customers in banking and finance, healthcare as well as government bodies.

“We already have GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) solutions deployed in many countries, which fulfil the overarching compliance needs of India’s data protection law as well. So that's definitely a business area for us,” he said.