Bangalore: SAS, the global leader in Business Intelligence solutions has announced that it has partnered with Indian Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) and B2K Corp Pvt. Ltd., for “Business Knowledge Series (BKS)” on data mining and business analytics. As part of the BKS, the consortium is organizing a two-day interactive forum on data mining and business analytics from May 27-28, 2005 at the Electronic City campus of IIIT-B.

The forum aimed at addressing the specific data mining and business analytics needs of key verticals like financial services, retail and outsourcing, will be inaugurated by Dr R. B. Burman, executive director, Reserve Bank of India. Saumitra Choudhuri, economic advisor to the PMO will present the keynote address.

The "Business Knowledge Series" is a program developed by SAS to provide organizations in India with in-depth knowledge on the business intelligence & analytics software and solutions from SAS.

Making this announcement, Sudipta K. Sen, CEO & managing director, SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd. said, "We are glad to partner with IIIT-B and B2KCorp for our Business Knowledge Series. We strongly advocate that, for organisations to streamline and derive further business value from their data resources, and leverage their existing investments in their IT infrastructure, they need to move beyond the traditional concept of Business Intelligence."

The interactive forum on data mining and business analytics is divided into two parts. The first part of the session will cover key trends in business and analytical intelligence in the Indian Industry, which will be addressed by key domain experts. The second part will consist of hands-on interactive training covering complex issues in data-mining and knowledge discovery using the business analytics solutions from SAS.

Vivek Kulkarni, former IT secretary to the Government of Karnataka and the chairman & CEO of B2K Corp. said, “This Business Knowledge Series will help organizations understand how Business Intelligence powered by advanced analytics can help them visualize where they should be heading, what customers they should be targeting and which suppliers they should be working with.”

He added, "Some of the topics that would be dealt with during the training session are Marketing Optimization Essentials, Metrics and Scorecards, Data Pre-Processing & Sampling, Customer Segmentation, Market Basket Analysis & Association Rules, Test of Hypothesis, Predictive Modelling - Regression analysis, Statistical Classification, Survival Analysis, Customer Churn & Retention, Analysis of Unstructured & Semi structured Data."

"This two-day interactive forum will teach participants methods to convert data into useful information, and therefore into a competitive advantage,” said Professor S Sadagopan, director, IIIT-Bangalore.