SAS Acquires Teragram to Strengthen Industry-Leading Text Mining, Analytics

Business Wire, March 17, 2008

If businesses fail to include this unstructured data in their analyses - of customers, market opportunities, internal operations, supply chains, etc. - they are only seeing part of the complete picture, and can make bad decisions as a result. Powerful analytics like SAS' can help organizations weave structured and unstructured data to uncover hidden patterns and trends, and then use this insight to make better decisions, solve problems and take advantage of opportunities.

SAS: A Pioneer in Text Mining

SAS has offered text mining capabilities within its software for more than a decade, and launched a specific text-mining product, SAS Text Miner, in 2002.

Today, SAS Text Miner is included in several industry-specific solutions, including SAS Warranty Analysis. Manufacturers such as Sub-Zero and Shanghai General Motors use this solution to bring together and analyze warranty claims and service data, much of it unstructured. They can discover potential problems early enough to take quick action, leading to improved product quality and enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Banks use text analytics on transcripts of customer calls and related metadata (such as length of call, hold time, number of transfers) to determine customers' satisfaction sentiment and predict outcomes (is a customer a good credit risk or are they likely to close an account, for example). Insurance companies use text analytics on adjusters' claim notes and demographic information to detect possible fraudulent claims.

SAS and Acquisitions

While other software vendors make acquisitions to buy customers and market share, SAS does things differently. SAS buys companies with specific and complementary technologies that enhance and extend SAS' own software lineup and help it better serve customers.

"We're committed to continuous, customer-focused innovation," said Goodnight. "The vast majority of this innovation is organic, coming from our world-class R&D and marketing efforts. Yet we're always on the lookout for great technology that complements our own and that helps us meet customer needs. Teragram's NLP technology meets these criteria, and we're excited to bring it and the talented Teragram team into the SAS family."

With the addition of more resources from SAS, Teragram's existing customers and OEM partners will see enhanced R&D and support from Teragram, which will operate as a SAS company.

Today's announcement came at SAS Global Forum, the largest annual SAS users group conference, attended by more than 3,000 business and IT users of SAS software and solutions.

About Teragram

Teragram Corp. is the market leader in mobile and multilingual natural language processing technologies that use the meaning of text to distill relevant information from vast amounts of data. Founded in 1997 by innovators in the field of computational linguistics, Teragram alone offers the speed, accuracy and global language support that customers and partners demand to retrieve and organize growing volumes of digital information. Teragram helps customers perform more efficient searches and better organize information in more than 30 languages, enabling them to reach new markets and make better decisions. Teragram serves customers across the publishing, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and financial industries, including Ariba, Ask.com, Associated Press, CNN, Factiva, EBSCO Publishing, FAST Search & Transfer, Forbes.com, InfoSpace, NYTimes Digital, OneSource, Reed Business Information, Ricoh, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo! http://www.teragram.com/info.>