SAS is no longer treating India as a back office – it is turning it into a core engine of global innovation and growth. The US-based analytics firm is steadily shifting high-value work to its India operations while expanding its play in the country’s fast-growing AI and analytics market.
At the centre of this shift is its Pune R&D hub, which has evolved from a support base into a unit with end-to-end product ownership. What began as an extension of global engineering teams is now designing, building and refining platforms deployed worldwide.
Pune emerges as key global engineering centre
“Pune is not a small offshore unit – it’s a 1,000+ strong engineering hub with global product responsibility and 30% annual growth rate. It is also the largest development hub outside the SAS headquarters in Cary, North Carolina and is instrumental in developing AI, risk, fraud, and compliance solutions,” Bryan Harris, EVP & CTO, told FE.
The transition, however, goes beyond scale to something more structural. “The R&D consolidation is not just about scale, but about ownership,” Harris said. Teams in India are now embedded across critical areas such as advanced analytics, cloud-native data platforms and emerging technologies. “Every part of our portfolio – Viya platform, industry solutions and standalone AI models – has a contribution from the Pune facility,” he added.
This expanded role aligns with SAS’s sharper technology focus. The company is prioritising four key areas – governance, agentic AI, digital twins and quantum AI – with India-based teams expected to play a central role in advancing these capabilities. The shift reflects both confidence in India’s engineering depth and the need for distributed innovation in an AI-driven landscape.
Alongside R&D, the commercial momentum in India is picking up. The country is emerging as a key growth market as enterprises accelerate their move from traditional analytics to AI-led decision systems. Sectors such as banking, manufacturing, healthcare and public services are increasingly investing in data-driven operations, creating a steady demand pipeline.
Cloud adoption is a major driver here. As organisations look to unify data and automate decision-making, SAS is positioning its offerings as enterprise-grade, scalable platforms that support both experimentation and production workloads. Government-led digital initiatives are adding further tailwinds, with analytics becoming central to policy execution and service delivery.
Analytics remains core as SAS bets on quantum AI
Even as it pushes into frontier areas like quantum, SAS is keeping analytics at the core of its strategy. At its annual conference, SAS Innovate, the company introduced SAS Quantum Lab, a specialised environment within the Viya platform aimed at helping organisations experiment with and apply quantum AI in real-world scenarios. “It serves as a launchpad for customers to bridge the gap between traditional computing and experimental quantum technologies,” Harris said.
Go-to-market strategy is also evolving. SAS is leaning more heavily on partnerships with system integrators, technology firms and domain specialists to co-develop solutions and enter new segments – an approach that reflects increasingly complex and collaborative buying cycles.
Talent remains a central lever in this strategy. SAS is investing in building a future-ready workforce in India, both internally and through external skilling initiatives, to address the structural gap in AI and data science capabilities while strengthening its own hiring pipeline.
Taken together, the moves signal a deeper strategic pivot. As global technology companies reassess where innovation should sit, SAS is doubling down on India – not just as a support base, but as a centre of capability, ownership and long-term growth.
(The correspondent is in Dallas at the invitation of SAS)