SAS positioned in the leader quadrant for customer data mining

SAS empowers users to explore and leverage data for strategic business advantage

26 January 2006 -  SAS, the leader in business intelligence, is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the "Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining, 1Q06" report* by Gartner, Inc. Leaders are vendors whose performance excels in the customer data mining market segment. Not only are they suitable for the majority of enterprises to consider today, but they also have a significant impact on the direction and growth of the market.

Customer data mining is the application of descriptive and predictive analytics (such as clustering, segmentation, estimation, prediction and affinity analysis) to support the marketing, sales and service functions. The focus of the Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining, 1Q06 is on vendors that offer the most-relevant and compelling solutions in the market.

SAS' data mining solution, SAS^® Enterprise Miner^TM, and text mining solution, SAS Text Miner, were evaluated by Gartner for this Magic Quadrant. To view the Magic Quadrant report, see: www.sas.com/news/analysts/by_firm_gartner.html. SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS' enhanced data mining software, streamlines the entire data mining process from data access to model deployment by supporting all necessary tasks within a single, integrated solution, all while providing the flexibility for efficient workgroup collaborations.

SAS Text Miner expands these data mining capabilities to distill value from vast deposits of textual data. Integrating text-based information with structured data enriches predictive modelling results and provides new and valuable insights for driving business and research initiatives forward.

SAS' award-winning data mining solutions also are available as part of SAS Customer Intelligence. The software enables organisations to find and retain profitable customers using demographic data, customer buying patterns and other data. The software allows organisations to segment markets and to identify best prospects for a targeted approach enabling tailored campaigns that dramatically increase response rates. Data and text mining help solve a variety of problems, improving production process quality, for example, by anticipating problems before they occur and assessing the risk of customer credit applications to balance risk exposure and profitability.

Using the SAS Intelligence Platform as a foundation, SAS offers targeted business solutions that support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, supply chain intelligence and more - as well as turnkey solutions for various vertical markets, such as financial services, life sciences, health care, retail, manufacturing and others.

About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims as warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

* Gartner Research "Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining Q106" by Gareth Herschel, Research Director, CRM Analytics, January 18, 2006.

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