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Any plans to retire? No, SAS co-founder Jim Goodnight insists.

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CARY, N.C. — After more than 30 years of building SAS into the world’s largest privately held software company, the passion to keep building – and especially to keep writing code – still burns in the gut of Jim Goodnight.

“No,” Goodnight said Tuesday when asked by WRAL TV’s Valonda Calloway if he was considering retirement.

Seemingly taken aback by the question, Goodnight paused for a moment and then explained why he’s still on the job. “Running SAS is too much of a joy,” he said, adding “I also enjoy the challenge.”

Off camera a few minutes later, The Skinny explained why Calloway had posed the question. He’s made billions. He’s in his 60s. Why not “cash in?”

“Have I done something wrong?” he replied.

Goodnight has loved writing code since his days as a professor at North Carolina State University, where the idea of SAS germinated. To this day, he pushes SAS’ thousands of programmers and developers to find new or better ways to analyze the world’s ever-increasing amounts of data.

For example, Goodnight said, he’s right in the middle of “writing code” for fraud detection, an effort that he will then “turn over to developers.”

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said, flashing a smile. “I enjoy that.”

Goodnight stressed during SAS’ annual media day and in the WRAL interview afterward that the opportunities for software product development are many. In other words, he himself has challenges to overcome or products to develop by massaging data as only masters can.

When Goodnight is not traveling around the world playing evangelist for SAS or speaking about global economic issues, he shuns suits and ties and plunges into the world of 1s and 0s. He certainly has embraced the greening of technology, both for SAS and for business.

SAS is building what he calls a “sustainability management dashboard” that will help executives “understand where they are with carbon emissions,” he explained.

The company also is building a huge solar farm on its campus. A new office building will be built to stringent environmental standards. He also said SAS is considering building a new data center, one justification being the ability to drastically reduce energy consumption and related costs.

SAS also is putting a different spin on the term social networking. Working with Los Angeles County, Goodnight and SAS are tracking what he called “social networks” of collaborators who are scamming the government with fake claims for child care funds.

In Wake County, meanwhile, SAS is working with local agencies to develop what Goodnight called a better means of tracking people within the criminal justice system. The goal: “To prevent people from falling through cracks in the probation system,” he said, noting the recent murder of the UNC-Chapel Hill student body president and of a Duke graduate student, crimes for which people on probation have been accused.

And there’s more. Goodnight is especially excited about what he called a “customer state vector.”

“Every time a consumer performs a transaction, we will receive an alert and update the individual vector,” he explained. Banks, retailers and other firms such as cruise lines will be able to better forecast consumer activity – from next purchases to whether that customer is likely to shop or bank or sail elsewhere.

The Skinny

WRAL Local Tech Wire Publisher and Editor Rick Smith dishes out tidbits from the local technology sector. Read more articles…