Sydney (Oct. 12, 2009) – SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, celebrates the 20th anniversary of JMP statistical discovery software this month.

Pronounced “jump,” JMP is exploratory data analysis and modelling software for the desktop. Designed to be interactive and easy to use, JMP makes data analysis and discoveries visual and helps users communicate their discoveries to others. JMP links graphs to each other and to data, enabling users to easily see trends, outliers and other patterns hidden in data.

“We premiered JMP 20 years ago with the mission to harness interactive graphics with statistical modelling. I am delighted to see the fruition of this product and the engagement of so many researchers to put this powerful combination to work,” said John Sall, co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS. Sall is also the chief architect of JMP.

The earliest customers of JMP were engineers and scientists who used JMP to explore and analyse research data without statistics expertise. Over 20 years, that user base has expanded to include financial analysts, researchers, risk modellers and many more: For example, a power company models energy use, MBA students analyse business data at prestigious business schools, and a medical centre eliminates invoicing inefficiencies and eradicates mistakes – all using JMP.

With the release of the latest version of JMP 8, market researchers can conduct choice studies to tailor products to consumer preferences, product reliability specialists get state-of-the-art interactive analysis of lifetime and warranty data, and scientists can more easily create and run designed experiments to make the most efficient use of resources.

JMP began as a way to take advantage of the interactive capabilities of the graphical user interface on the Apple Macintosh, and it has come a long way since then.

“At first, in 1989, it ran only on a Mac with one megabyte of memory and no connectivity to the outside world,” said Jeff Perkinson, JMP Product Manager.

“Now, JMP can handle virtually unlimited amounts of data in its 64-bit edition, JMP runs on Windows and Linux in addition to Mac, it is a full client to SAS, and it has a scripting language that makes it a flexible application development environment for SAS programming languages,” said Perkinson, who was with JMP when it began shipping to customers on Oct. 5, 1989.

Perkinson added that although JMP has changed and grown since the first version, some things remain the same. “At its core, JMP hasn’t lost its personality. It still is interactive, graphical and fun,” Perkinson said.

The next version of the software, JMP 9, is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2010.

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About JMP JMP is a business unit of SAS, established in 1989 to create interactive statistical discovery software for the desktop. John Sall, SAS co-founder and Executive Vice President, heads the JMP business unit.

About SAS SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know® .