SAS Supercharges Predictive Analytics

Business Wire, Feb 5, 2008

SAS([R]) Users Learn from the Past, Monitor the Present and Predict Future Outcomes to Gain Competitive Advantage

CARY, N.C. -- SAS, the leader in business intelligence, has significantly enhanced its award-wining SAS Enterprise Miner[TM], SAS Text Miner, and SAS Forecast Server software, bringing predictive analytics to their highest level yet.

The newest release of SAS Enterprise Miner improves productivity through added interactive advanced visualization and new analytics. Fifteen new analytical tools improve the resulting predictive models, which can mean significant savings for customers with proactive marketing departments such as in retail or banking. With innovative new modeling algorithms, including gradient boosting, partial least squares and support vector machines, SAS Enterprise Miner users can build more stable and more accurate models and thus make better decisions faster and with more confidence.

"Given SAS Enterprise Miner's enhanced palate of data mining tools, we are able to build a wider variety of competitive models and thus improve the robustness of our modeling efforts." said Tim Rey, Manager, Data Mining and Modeling, The Dow Chemical Company. "Continually improving our data mining efforts helps us to enhance the value we bring to the company."

"SAS has taken an already powerful workbench in SAS Enterprise Miner and made it even more powerful for our applications--ranging from fundamental to very complex--all with the ease we've come to expect from Enterprise Miner," said Stephen Gawtry, Senior Research Scientist, Elder Research, Inc.

Unstructured data from customer feedback forms, blogs, call centers and other sources is now incorporated even more easily in SAS Text Miner. Combining that with SAS Enterprise Miner's improved ability to visualize analytical results, SAS Text Miner quickly discovers and exploits patterns that would otherwise remain hidden in stored business documents. Bringing these new insights to decision makers can create a significant competitive advantage.

SAS Forecast Server's new release includes user interface enhancements that provide greater control. There are now more outlier detection options, more complex filtering capability, and six new statistics of fit. Over a dozen new project management macros help handle routine project management tasks more effectively in batch mode. And performance and scalability improvements allow SAS Forecast Server to work even more efficiently with very large data sets - decreasing the time needed for decisions.

"In this release, the new analytic tools and productivity enhancements for analysts are another sign of SAS' commitment to its continued leadership of the advanced analytics software market," said Dan Vesset, Vice President, Business Analytics research, IDC. "Advanced analytics tools for predictive and descriptive analytics are a key component of providing organizations with better decision-making capabilities that can lead to competitive advantage."

Quick problem solving can save millions. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform's "integration by design" streamlines data mining and forecasting by building in required data integration and metadata preprocessing steps before beginning advanced analytics. With SAS data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence all working together, the guidance resulting from analytics will be available sooner, helping decision makers uncover timely insights.

Using the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform as a foundation, SAS offers targeted business solutions that support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, supply chain intelligence and more - as well as turnkey solutions for vertical markets, such as financial services, health care, transportation, manufacturing and others.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business intelligence and analytical software and services. Customers at 43,000 sites use SAS software to improve performance through insight from data, resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions; more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; compliance with governmental regulations; research breakthroughs; and better products and processes. Only SAS offers leading data integration, storage, analytics and business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW([R]). www.sas.com

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. [R] indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright [c] 2008 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.