It's touch-and-go as to whether software giant SAS will continue its unbroken string of annual revenue growth this year.

Revenue so far this year at the Cary-based company is roughly flat compared to 2008, CEO Jim Goodnight said today. Last year SAS generated $2.26 billion in revenue, up about 5 percent from 2007.

"The whole industry has had a tremendous slowdown this last year," Goodnight said. SAS  sells business intelligence and analytics software that companies use to analyze their business and predict trends.

Speaking in front of a projected image of a graph showing annual revenue increases ever since SAS went into business in 1976, Goodnight said: "It is going to be real close as to whether we get to add another bar."

Goodnight's comments came this morning during SAS's annual Media Day, which attracted about 20 journalists from around the world to its sprawling headquarters campus.

Despite losing nearly $2 billion of his net worth, Jim Goodnight remains the richest person in North Carolina and held on to the No. 33 spot in the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans.

Goodnight's net worth of $6.8 billion was down from $8.7 billion last year, Forbes reported. Goodnight, 66, is co-founder and CEO of SAS Institute, the Cary-based company that is the world's largest privately owned software maker.

John Sall, who co-founded SAS in 1976, also saw his ranking drop a bit, to No. 91 from No. 84 last year. His net worth declined to $3.4 billion from $4.4 billion.

The only other Tar Heel on the Forbes list was Clemmie Spangler Jr. of Charlotte, with a net worth of $1.65 billion, down from $2 billion last year. He is ranked No. 212 on the Forbes list.

Microsoft's Bill Gates topped the list, followed by investor Warren Buffett and Oracle CEO Lawrence Ellison.

See the full list here.

Red Hat has beefed up its board with an accounting professor from Brigham Young University.

The Raleigh software company announced this afternoon that Donald H. Livingstone, a teaching professor at BYU's Marriott School of Business, is the ninth member of its board of directors.

Livingstone will make $70,000 a year in cash for his board and committee work at Red Hat, the company reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. He'll also receive an initial grant of restricted stock worth about $300,000. And he'll be eligible to get $150,000 more in restricted stock every year.

"His experience and financial acumen will be key as we look to drive further growth in our business," said Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst, in a prepared statement.

Red Hat shares soared today after the Raleigh software company late Wednesday reported sales and profit that beat Wall Street expectations.

The Linux distributor is benefitting as corporate and government customers seek a cheaper choice in computer-operating software. Red Hat is winning more contracts, and longer ones, suggesting that some technology spending is picking up despite the recession.

"Just look at the numbers. We're clearly taking share," CEO Jim Whitehurst told Bloomberg News. "To grow at double-digit rates in this economy is market validation that our open-source model works."

Second-quarter revenue rose 12 percent to $183.6 million. Profit climbed to 15 cents per share.

Red Hat investors will look closely later today to see how quickly the Raleigh software seller is winning new, and longer contracts.

The world's largest distributor of the Linux computer-operating software is scheduled to report its latest financial results this afternoon. Wall Street analysts expect profit of about 15 cents a share on sales of $179 million.

Barring any big earnings surprise, Wall Street will dig into the numbers for the quarter that ended in August for signs that demand is increasing from recession-weary corporate and government customers. Red Hat's open-source software is considered a cheaper alternative to proprietary software such as Microsoft's Windows.

A Morrisville maker of spreadsheet software will become part of a larger software conglomerate based in Japan.

FarPoint Technologies makes spreadsheet technology that software programmers can use to create Excel-like operations within their programs. The company's 50 employees will remain at its Morrisville office, which will become the East Coast office of GrapeCity. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

GrapeCity is based in Japan and has its U.S. headquarters in Kirkland, Wash. The company partners with Microsoft and develops software components such as the spreadsheet software from FarPoint. GrapeCity has roughly 850 employees.

The two companies have worked together for more than a decade, with GrapeCity distributing FarPoint's products in Japan. But now GrapeCity will control the global distribution of FarPoint's software.

"It is a very friendly acquisition," said Sanjeev Jagtap, GrapeCity's director of product management.

The founder and CEO of SAS said in an interview with Bloomberg News that going public or being acquired are not options for the privately held software giant.

Goodnight told Bloomberg that he turned down two acquisition offers from the same company two years ago, but didn't identify the prospective buyer.

"Most people running a public company would give anything to be private right now," Goodnight said in in the interview. "The word is out that we aren't interested in being acquired."

Here's some good news for Red Hat: the Linux software market is expected to continue to enjoy robust growth over the next several years.

Linux subscription revenue is expected to grow 16.9 percent annually through 2013, according to a new study issued this week by market research firm IDC. The worldwide market is expected to cross the $1 billion threshold in 2012 and hit $1.2 billion in 2013.

The market expanded 23.4 percent from 2007 to 2008, IDC found.

Raleigh-based Red Hat is the No. 1 supplier of subscriptions for Linux software, an open-source operating system that competes with Microsoft's Windows.

Every week during this recession, employers that are cutting staff file notices with state officials giving details about the layoffs, as required by federal law.

Some letters to fulfill the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act signal that the lives of dozens or hundreds of employees and their families will be disrupted.

One recent letter warns of a "mass layoff" affecting four workers. The move points to a hard truth of the recession: Companies continue to make job cuts, big and small.

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, which employs 29 at its offices in Morrisville, plans to eliminate four software engineers, according to its WARN letter sent to the N.C. Department of Commerce.

The California company will try to find other jobs within Genesys for the affected employees. If that doesn't happen, they will be terminated on Oct. 21.

Genesys has been a division of the French corporation Alcatel-Lucent since 2000. The company makes software for businesses' customer-service centers.

What did you do with your summer vacation? John McLean wrote software to help IBM automate the process of counting computers on its Research Triangle Park campus. Last summer, at Raleigh-based Red Hat, he developed software that helps control robots.

Next week he's starting his freshman year at Duke University, with plans to study computer science and religion. His college costs will be partly paid with a 2009 Fedora scholarship, which recognizes students for their contributions to free, open-source software.

Here are some highlights from a recent telephone interview with McLean, who is 18 and lives in Cary: