SAS to add high performance text mining to its powerful in-memory analytics software in Q3 2012

The announcement came at The Premier Business Leadership Series event in Amsterdam, a business conference presented by SAS. SAS High-Performance Analytics appliance-ready software for Teradata and EMC Greenplum, performs complex analytics on big data.

SAS High-Performance Analytics, which began shipping last year, will be enhanced in August with new text-mining support to provide companies with insight gained from unstructured data in emails, social media, call center logs, documents and other information. The addition of the new text mining feature will give businesses in the Middle East region the strategic advantage of uncovering and seizing more opportunities.

Unstructured data, accounting for more than 80% of today's data, can be difficult to analyze, often swamping traditional computer architectures. SAS High-Performance Analytics will provide new capabilities to address even the largest text repositories, known as 'big data,' revealing hidden relationships within unstructured data. This helps Middle East businesses uncover potential opportunities, which includes new lines of business, untapped customer segments, quality and client satisfaction issues, and profits.

"Enterprise data assets have grown exponentially in recent years and these massive amounts of structured and unstructured data require two things to be valuable for decision making," said Surya Mukherjee, Senior Analyst, Ovum. "First, the data volume must be abstracted from users so that they can analyze very large data sets without having to worry about the plumbing. And second, these insights must be delivered quickly to decision makers before a business opportunity is lost or a risky situation develops into a catastrophe. High-performance analytics like those offered by SAS have the potential to generate significant value from data, providing answers in near-real time and delivering competitive advantage."

SAS High-Performance Analytics slashes analysis time from days to hours, from minutes to seconds, without sampling or using less-than-ideal analytic techniques, even on billions of rows of data. This technology will proliferate across SAS' broad product line for faster, better answers within enterprises facing tight competition and increased regulation.

"High-performance analytics is the most significant SAS technology advance over the last 10 years," said Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS. "We realized that organizations were accumulating massive amounts of data that could provide answers to questions they could never ask before. The analysis took so long to process, answers were irrelevant by the time the computer spit them out. High-performance analytics provides answers when the information is still useful and leaves time to explore multiple possibilities."

"With high-performance analytics applied to their text data, companies can greatly improve decision making," said Radhika Kulkarni, Vice President of Advanced Analytics. SAS. "For example, a large financial services firm with millions of customer accounts and thousands of products can merge customer call-center transcripts with demographic and financial data to improve response rates from marketing campaigns with SAS. Add to that the speed of SAS High-Performance Analytics, and marketers can interactively adjust and fine-tune scenarios to find the best way to reach customers."

SAS High-Performance Analytics could be highly beneficial in many other scenarios, such as manufacturing. A manufacturer using SAS could build predictive models from product and parts catalogs, which contain millions of items with full text descriptions. The models could then be used to match new customer service requests with appropriate information, and prioritize ordering needs in near-real time.

The SAS High-Performance Analytics product family includes other solutions, such as SAS High-Performance Risk, SAS Visual Analytics and its patent-pending SAS LASR Analytic Server. With these solutions organizations can explore all data, analyze billions of rows of data in just minutes or seconds, and visually present results. Business professionals can use a graphic interface in SAS Visual Analytics to explore data without IT support.

"The addition of text mining is poised to give local enterprises a big push for their business growth. SAS High Performance Analytics has proven to be a strategic 'must have tool' for today's businesses, which gives them the advantage of discovering new leads and business potentials. Our customers can now find more confidence and security in using our portfolio of products as SAS remains true to its promise of helping its customers move one step ahead of the competition," concluded Shukri Dabaghi, General Manager, SAS Middle East.