NICE Systems and SAS Sign Strategic Partnership to Deliver Complete Customer Intelligence

Joint solution to change way organizations make strategic decisions
through the convergence of business intelligence and interaction analytics

Cary, N. C. and Ra’anana, Israel, October 19, 2005 – SAS, the leader in business intelligence and NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE), a global provider of advanced solutions that enable organizations to extract Insight from Interactions™ today announced a strategic partnership to provide a joint solution that links SAS® Business Intelligence with NICE interaction content analytics. The joint solution, which combines technology already available and implemented at customer sites, improves business performance by combining customer intelligence derived from structured data with insight from customer interactions derived from unstructured multimedia data sources.

SAS offers an integrated business intelligence platform for analyzing data from all enterprise sources, such as CRM, ERP, billing and other systems. SAS solutions deliver strategic value by providing predictive power to make key business decisions and improve performance. SAS® Enterprise BI Server will interface with NICE Perform™, which captures and analyzes customer interactions (via telephony or web) by using multi-dimensional analytics, such as word spotting, emotion detection and screen content analysis. NICE Perform is revolutionizing the decision making process by helping organizations understand and anticipate customer and market dynamics and by helping them understand why issues arise and what is likely to happen next.

SAS and NICE joint customers can now gain a wider picture of their businesses, through a holistic solution that for the first time provides content analytics on both structured and unstructured data, from both customer transactions and spoken interactions. This expanded solution offers the broadest set of data sources with sophisticated tools for high levels of reliability, accuracy and predictability; it addresses a variety of critical business issues such as customer loyalty and churn to improve bottom line, profitability, revenue per user and fraud detection.

"NICE is pleased to establish this strategic alliance with SAS," said Haim Shani, Chief Executive Officer of NICE. “Our joint solution is the first of its kind and represents a major paradigm shift in the way companies will evaluate and understand their business and improve the bottom line. This is another milestone in delivering on our vision of Insight from Interactions”.

This joint solution comes from the two leaders in their respective markets. SAS is the world’s leading provider of business intelligence software, having won numerous industry awards and having earned multiple industry leadership rankings by independent analyst firms around the globe. NICE is the leader in providing insight from customer interactions based on advanced content analytics and is recognized by industry analysts as the global leader in this market.

"This solution represents a powerful combination. The unstructured data that we get from NICE offers a comprehensive view that, when combined with SAS business intelligence, enables organizations to make better business decisions based on a more holistic view of their customers,” added Paul Bierbusse, senior director of customer intelligence solutions at SAS. “Together we enable our joint base of existing and potential customers to analyze customer-buying trends, segment customers with precision, design targeted sales and marketing campaigns, and measure ROI with their current systems. We are excited to partner with NICE and offer enterprises all over the world a new way to make decisions and improve business performance.”

The synergetic leadership of the two companies has a combined installed base over ten thousand customers, including over 75% of the Fortune 100, will set new standards for the enterprise performance with this joint, end-to-end solution that bridges the last mile in business intelligence.

About Nice
NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) is the leading provider of Insight from Interactions™, based on advanced content analytics – of telephony, web, radio and video communications. NICE's solutions improve business and operational performance, as well as security. NICE has over 23,000 customers in 100 countries, including the world's top 10 banks and over 75% of the Fortune 100 companies. More information is available at www.nice.com.