Pros
Good technology vision around analytics and key industry solutions CEO believes in his company and the values. Middle management sadly kills these. Market share is still quite high. Smart people in R&D and tech roles. If you want smooth sailing without much growth and change and if you can forget about the political turmoil around you, if you can live with your management then this is a place for you. Customer base is big and even with slow growth the company will not vanish quickly. With no real succession plan and an aging owner, with senior execs being kicked out each quarter, eventually they will have to sell to private equity or to Microsoft. This could lead to new opportunities.
Cons
Not changing fast enough. The new architecture comes to late, takes too long to mature and confuses existing customers that are locked-into the old stack Most country sales teams only come close to reaching target by financially engineering contract renewals with existing customers. Net new customers are few and far in between. The attempt to modernize the organizational structure and move to a globally aligned, functional model totally backfires. Matrix doesn't work. Everybody is working in silos and is losing trust in management. Local country management team is weak in most places and afraid to act decisively after various senior executives were fired at short notice. Low morale as everyone sees that SAS grows by only 1-2% in a market that grows double-digit. Practically there is a headcount freeze and the company didn't invest wisely when they still had the profits to do so. Now the CEO cuts investment in times of underperformance. The company still doesn't understand that it needs a strong ecosystem. No investment or culture to embed technology in other platforms or work with partner based on trust, Staff gets open feedback from EMEA leadership that they don't trust the strategy. If the leaders don't believe in HQ, all go into hiding mode to sit it out. HR brags about paid for Best Place to Work awards while totally missing that the company is run by an inner circle that is political. Quality of HR in EMEA is abysmal. Turnover in Sales and Marketing is high. The software still needs 10+ days for a system engineer to install and the company wants customers to pay for this in a world of instantly available cloud software. Most enterprise customers were sold big tickets and are only using 20% of what they paid for. There is a great risk to lose renewal business in the coming years around BI, data management and niche solutions. The company doesn't have a strong industry value proposition, beyond some nice marketing messaging. Company losing focus by jumping on every trend like Digital Marketing, Cyber security, data protection, IoT. Spreading resources resulted not being successful in any of these launches during the last 5 years.
