SAS Institute Debuts Enterprise Miner Software On Sun Microsystem's Solaris

Business Wire, August 5, 1998

PALO ALTO, Calif. and CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 5, 1998-- SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company, today announced the availability of Enterprise Miner software, the Institute's highly touted data-mining product, on the Solaris(TM) operating environment. Enterprise Miner software is the second major Institute product to make its UNIX debut on Sun's popular Solaris operating environment - the most prevalent UNIX platform among SAS(R) software customers. In May, Version 2.0 of the Institute's Scalable Performance Data Server - a data server optimized for data warehousing and decision-support applications - was launched on the Solaris operating environment.

In the U.S. alone, major banks, lending institutions, mortgage companies, marketing firms and pharmaceutical companies are already mining their data for competitive advantage with Enterprise Miner software. Now, these companies will have the added flexibility to do so in the Solaris environment.

"Enterprise Miner software running on the Solaris environment is the latest milestone in a long, productive R&D relationship between the Institute and Sun," said Mark Brown, SAS Institute's program manager for data mining. "Successful data mining involves analyzing enormous quantities of data spread throughout an organization, so this collaboration between Sun and SAS Institute combines our strengths for our mutual customers' advantage. SAS Institute's data-mining technology is the only end-to-end client/server solution to evolve from a data-warehousing heritage. Sun is also unique in that it provides customers total choice from the lowest-end desktop to the highest-end enterprise server. Reinforcing our joint work in data mining is Sun's strong presence in the Customer Technology Center at our Cary, North Carolina world headquarters."

"Sun is again pleased to be the first open systems platform for SAS Institute's latest solution, Enterprise Miner software," said Bill Cook, Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s vice president of strategic sales. "We recognize the importance to our customers in obtaining the most valuable information possible from their data through data mining. Based on the number of customers already using Enterprise Miner software on Sun, we anticipate broad market acceptance across all industries."

What is data mining?

Data mining is the process of selecting, exploring, and modeling huge volumes of data to uncover previously unknown patterns for business advantage. Enterprise Miner, the first data-mining software to offer a common environment for business analysts and quantitative professionals, is also the first to address the entire data-mining process (sample, explore, modify, model, assess) within one automated solution.

Enterprise Miner software offers the widest range of algorithms in a single package - decision trees, clustering, neural networks, data-mining regression, associations, and others. It also introduces a unique way to compare the results of analyses and select the most effective method.

Enterprise Miner software's Process Flow Diagram, a drag-and-drop graphical user interface (GUI), automates the entire data-mining process of sampling, exploring, modifying, modeling, and assessing (SEMMA) customer data. This GUI provides the common ground for business analysts and quantitative professionals, who must collaborate for successful data mining.

Distributing data mining results on the Web

Enterprise Miner software provides companies with the means not only to find the answers they're looking for, but also to ask the right questions. The decision-support capabilities of SAS software provide a comprehensive and integrated set of tools for every aspect of data mining - from accessing data from diverse sources and employing the SAS data-mining methodology, to delivering results through powerful presentation features. This process reveals trends, explains known outcomes, predicts future outcomes, and identifies factors that can secure a desired effect.

Generating meaningful results through data mining is not enough - companies must also be able to share the knowledge gained through data mining organization-wide. This is best accomplished with SAS/IntrNet(TM) software, which liberally incorporates Java technology. In this context, the Institute's market leading analytic strengths complement Sun's leadership in providing Web technologies.

About SAS Institute

Now in its 22nd year, SAS Institute is one of the top ten largest independent software vendors in the world, and is the largest privately held software company. The leading provider of data warehousing and decision-support software, the Institute has won DM Review's 1997 Data Acquisition/Delivery award for Data Warehousing. Other awards include the reader-selected 1996 and 1997 Datamation magazine Data Warehousing Product of the Year award, the 1997 Database Programming & Design Database Dozen award, and Software Magazine's Editor's Choice award for decision-support.

SAS Institute provides an integrated suite of information-delivery tools that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organization into information that business users need to make decisions. To make data useful, SAS software collects data from almost every platform and data format; cleans and transforms data into information that users will understand; and stores that information in an open and efficient data warehouse structure. To explore that information, SAS software includes OLAP, query and reporting, EIS, data mining, analysis, data visualization, and application-development interfaces. SAS software is client/server and Web enabled. SAS Institute also delivers business solutions that are complete packages for financial consolidation and reporting, clinical trials analysis; oil and gas analysis and IT service management. Currently, SAS software and business solutions are being used at more than 31,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 120 countries.