John Sall
Co-founder and Executive Vice President, SAS
John Sall is a co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS, leader in business analytics software and largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. He also leads the JMP business division, which creates interactive and highly visual data analysis software for the desktop.
Sall joined Jim Goodnight and two others in 1976 to establish SAS. He designed, developed and documented many of the earliest analytical procedures for Base SAS® software and was the initial author of SAS/ETS® software and SAS/IML®. He also led the R&D effort that produced SAS/OR®, SAS/QC® and Version 6 of Base SAS.
In the late 1980s, Sall noticed a niche that SAS software was not filling. Researchers and engineers – whose jobs didn’t revolve solely around statistical analysis – needed an easy-to-use and affordable stats program. A new software product, today known as JMP®, was launched in 1989 to dynamically link statistical analysis with the graphical capabilities of Macintosh computers. Now running on Windows and Macintosh, JMP continues to play an important role in modeling processes across industries as a desktop data visualization tool. It also provides a visual interface to SAS in an expanding line of solutions.
Sall was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998. He served on the board of The Nature Conservancy (2002-2011), reflecting his strong interest in international conservation and environmental issues. He is a member of the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Board of Trustees. In 1997, Sall and his wife, Ginger, contributed to the founding of Cary Academy, an independent college preparatory day school for students in grades 6 through 12.
He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Beloit College in Beloit, WI, and a master’s degree in economics from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL. He studied graduate-level statistics at NCSU, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2003.
