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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John P. Sall (born 1948) is an American billionaire businessman and computer software developer, who co-founded SAS Institute, an analytics software company, and created the JMP statistical software.
John Sall | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | 1948 (age 75–76) |
| Occupation(s) | Co-founder and executive vice president, SAS Institute |
| Spouse | Ginger |
| Children | 4 |
John Sall was born in Rockford, Illinois in 1948.[1] As a child, he developed an interest in science.[2]
He received a bachelor's degree in history from Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. Sall felt he graduated into a weak job market, so he went to graduate school at Northern Illinois University, where he earned a master's degree in economics. It was at graduate school that Sall became interested in statistics and computer science.[3] He went on to study graduate-level statistics at North Carolina State University, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2003.[4][5][6] He received an honorary doctorate from NIU in 2014.[7]
Sall collaborated with James Goodnight at North Carolina State University.[8][9][1] In 1976, the two co-founded SAS Institute, an analytics software company, with fellow NCSU alumni Anthony James Barr and Jane Helwig.[8][5]
The company is best known for developing the SAS suite of analytics and data management software. Sall designed, developed, and documented many of the earliest procedures of the SAS language.[5] Some of his contributions included procedures for working with time series, econometrics, categorical data and matrix algebraic manipulations.[10] SAS software was originally developed to analyze agricultural data,[11] but its modern applications include machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning, and computer vision.[12]
SAS Institute grew rapidly,[13] becoming one of the largest privately held software providers in the world[14] and earning $3.2 billion in annual revenue as of 2022.[15] In 2021, it was announced that the company was preparing for an initial public offering (IPO).[16] During this time, the company has invested heavily into the research and development of artificial intelligence tools designed for industries like finance, healthcare, and insurance.[12][17]
Sall started developing JMP, which originally stood for "John's Macintosh Project", in the 1980s, when the graphical user interface was introduced on the Macintosh.[1][9] JMP is distributed by JMP Statistical Discovery, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of SAS.[18] Sall and a small team of developers spent a year and a half working on JMP before version one was released in October 1989.[19] Sall continued to do coding and product development for JMP software for more than 20 years, supporting Windows 3.1, writing the product in different implementation languages, re-writing the product's "nervous system" and improving the JMP scripting language.[19] Today Sall still acts as JMP's chief architect.[1]
He also co-authored the book JMP Start Statistics with Ann Lehman and Lee Creighton.[20]
Sall lives in Cary, North Carolina. He is married to Ginger Sall, with whom he has four children.[8]
Sall was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015,[21] he is also a member of the North Carolina State University board of trustees. In 1994, he served as chairman of the Interface Foundation of North America.[22] He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from North Carolina State University's College of Sciences in 2017.[23]
Sall owns about one-third of SAS Institute, while Goodnight owns the remainder.[8] According to Forbes, Sall's net worth was approximately $4.2 billion as of 2016, making him the 392nd richest person in the United States at the time.[24] As of 2009, most of Sall's net worth was illiquid, and based on the estimated worth of his partial ownership in SAS Institute. In 2018,[25] Sall was still working, doing programming, and leading a team of developers.[1]
Sall and his wife are involved in conservation, international health and development, and environmental issues through the Sall Family Foundation.[26] Sall was on the board of The Nature Conservancy from 2002 to 2011,[5] and is a member of the board for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.[24] Sall and his wife also work with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), CARE, Pan American Health Organization, and other non-profits.[3][7] They contributed to the founding of Cary Academy, an independent college preparatory school for students grades six through 12.[4][5]
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