Building on its market leadership in data analysis, SAS extends its data mining solution to business professionals.

CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 17, 1997--SAS Institute Inc. today announced it is developing an easy-to-use data mining business solution that will empower business technologists with neural networks, decision trees, associations (such as market-basket analyses), and other high-powered analytical tools. SAS(R) software enhancements, available in June, will help these business decision makers increase profitability by meeting goals in areas such as customer relations, one-to-one marketing, credit lending, and credit card fraud detection.

Business technologists - that is, marketing analysts and other business-unit decision makers who want to predict consumer behavior or perform other powerful analyses - currently have few options other than turning to quantitative experts or using single-purpose, shrink-wrapped software currently on the market. Such packages might allow the business decision maker to create a decision tree, for example. But SAS Institute's solution, with its visual data mining GUI for business users, is the first to combine micro-mining ease of use with macro-mining analytical depth. The product will offer a complete range of algorithms: decision trees, clustering, neural networks, data mining regression, and associations. Users will be able, in an automated fashion, to compare different modeling techniques, allowing them to easily choose the most effective model for addressing their business problem. The offering's name and price will be announced later.

"Organizations interested in one-to-one marketing should select a comprehensive suite of tools that provides multiple analytical techniques," said Wayne Eckerson, senior analyst at Patricia Seybold Group. "These techniques must allow for the testing of different methods to identify the approach that best meets specific data mining needs, such as customer acquisition, customer retention, and cross-selling. SAS Institute's data mining solution promises to provide these multiple analytical techniques."

A comprehensive suite

Thousands of SAS Institute customers already use SAS software for data mining projects, which combine the expertise of model-building statisticians with SAS Institute's well-established analytical and reporting offerings. SAS Institute's enhanced data mining business solution will offer business analysts an integrated, multiple-modeling approach to creating predictive models. The solution will include SAS software's acclaimed data warehousing and analytic capabilities in a single package that is open and scalable from PCs to mainframes.

"We have leveraged our expertise in data warehousing and our heritage in quantitative analysis to develop a comprehensive solution," said SAS Institute President Jim Goodnight, who is personally involved in developing the new solution. "Our data mining solution will let businesses fully exploit the information in their data warehouses - paving the way for business decisions that lead to notable returns on investment."

Software enhancements in the works include automated sampling routines; an optimized data store that reduces sample sizes so algorithms run efficiently; access to multiple algorithms; an automatic assessment capability that compares models created by different algorithms; and a model-management facility, which stores projects for later comparisons.

Of particular benefit to business technologists is the product's GUI, which launches the data mining process of sampling, exploring, modifying, modeling, and assessing (SEMMA). [See product backgrounder for more detail on SEMMA.] SAS Institute's new data mining GUI will be designed so business technologists with little or no statistical expertise can quickly and easily navigate through the process. But it's also designed so quantitative experts can go "behind the scenes" to fine tune the analytical processes.

"Data mining is an iterative process, not a one-shot deal," said Mark Brown, SAS Institute's program manager for data mining. "We're proposing a way for business technologists to get the most out of their organization's wealth of data by letting them build their own predictive models. SAS Institute's data mining solution will offer automated data mining through a process they can maximize over time. For business technologists, we're providing analytical empowerment through data mining."

Now in its 21st year, SAS Institute is the world's ninth-largest independent software company. The Institute's success is due in part to its continued investment in R&D - $209 million in 1996, and more than $1 billion since its formation. This commitment to customer solution-oriented R&D has resulted in the Institute being awarded the reader-selected 1996 and 1997 Datamation magazine Data Warehousing Product of the Year, the 1996 DM Review magazine World Class Solutions for Data Warehousing award (for Outstanding Service & Decision Support tools), the Data Warehouse World "Excellence in Business Information" award (customer service), and other industry honors.

SAS Institute delivers an integrated suite of information delivery software for business decision making that addresses the unique needs of business users and IT departments in their support of their businesses. SAS software includes capabilities and tools for data warehousing including managing, organizing, and exploiting the warehouse; business intelligence including EIS, online analytical processing, application development, and decision support; and applied analysis including technical data analysis, data mining, and neural networking. SAS Institute also delivers business solutions software for applications such as financial consolidation and reporting, clinical trials analysis, and IT service management. Currently, SAS software is used at more than 30,000 business, government, and business sites worldwide.

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CONTACT: SAS Institute Inc.

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http://www.sas.com

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