"We're trying to turn towards the green shift at SAS," Goodnight said. "We look at the cost of the green computing centre. Our biggest usage of electricity is to power all the servers and keep them cool and virtualization helps reduce the demand on the hardware."

Two of SAS's products for financial services are Credit Scoring and Credit Risk Management. SAS saw more interest in the credit risk management product after the US housing crisis started, though Goodnight attributes the high level of foreclosures and defaults to faulty rating systems.

"The underlying problem was these structured investment vehicles, these groups of mortgage-backed securities, were mis-rated," Goodnight said. "Sub-prime means not credit worthy. How can you take a bundle of these bad loans and put them together and all of a sudden end up with Triple A paper?" He added companies often research only two to three years of a borrower's history. "Nobody dug down below the surface to really understand the nature of these securities."

SAS places a huge emphasis on employee retention, with on-site day care centres, and giving workers their own offices. Goodnight said the company's lower turnover rate means it spends less money on recruiting and training, and more money on perks.

"It's my view that a company's going to spend the same amount of money whether they have this stuff or not because if they don't have it they'll have to replace employees," he said, adding if you give workers their own offices, then can concentrate better on their work. "We're trying to minimize the cubicles, maximize the use of private offices because people need their privacy to think, especially when they're writing or working on code or (chuckling) watching a soap opera on TV, whatever they do in their private offices."