Leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC has recognised SAS as the largest predictive analytics vendor in CRM per its most recent study "Worldwide CRM Analytic Applications 2004 Vendor Shares: Strength and Churn".

"SAS Institute grew by 25.8% in 2004 and stands by a wide margin as the largest predictive analytics player in CRM, " says Robert Blumstein, research director, CRM Analytics and Marketing Applications at IDC.

"Its offerings emphasise optimisation over reporting but with increasingly accessible graphics that non-rocket scientists can readily understand and employ. To this purpose SAS Marketing Optimisation is built on the SAS9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform."

In its study, which presents market sizing and market share positioning for CRM analytics from 2002 to 2004, IDC clearly delineated the CRM analytics market into two major segments: core analytics and predictive analytics.

"SAS applauds IDC for distinguishing between core analytics and predictive analytics in its annual CRM analytics market study," said Jim Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS.

"Core analytics are essential for understanding where an organisation has been. Predictive analytics tell an organisation where it should go next by providing actionable intelligence. SAS has long stressed that predictive analytics are key to any successful CRM strategy."

IDC categorises core analytics as being used to "define or analyse a current or past state and consist of both tools and packaged applications that compute frequencies, cross-tabs, and query and reporting cubes. These analytics correspond to the following IDC functional markets: query, reporting, and analysis, packaged data marts, and analytic applications using these functions or technologies."

IDC defines predictive analytics as including "all analytics, both tools and packaged applications, more complex in their mathematics than core analytics. Predictive analytics are used to determine the probable future outcome of an event or the likelihood of a current state where it is unknown. These analytics include data mining, clustering, decision trees, market basket analysis, regression modelling, neural nets, genetic algorithms, text mining, hypothesis testing, decision analytics, and so on.

Predictive analytics may also include or be linked with a scoring capability. These correspond to advanced analytics in the following IDC functional markets: data mining and technical data analysis as well as analytic applications using the preceding described functions."