“The addition of Teragram’s domain expertise and NLP technology will change the landscape of the BI and analytics markets,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. “Teragram’s technologies augment, strengthen and extend SAS’ ability to combine structured and unstructured data – not only in our text mining solution but embedded across the entire SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform – to drive better answers faster.”

Teragram, a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., will be run as a SAS company. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. Teragram’s NLP technology is well-established, with a customer base including CNN, Forbes.com, NYTimes Digital, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo!

“As the data explosion continues, companies need an intelligent way to make sense of it all, whether data is in structured databases or in the huge variety of unstructured sources,” said Yves Schabes, President of Teragram. “Teragram and its technology fit perfectly into SAS’ analytics and text mining efforts, as SAS continues to innovate in this rapidly growing market. We’re pleased to join a company that delivers the software businesses need to blend structured and unstructured data and reach better, timelier and more accurate decisions.”

Natural Language Processing

Teragram’s natural language processing (NLP) technologies help turn text – in many languages and from many sources – into useable information. NLP enables richer data processing at the level of words, linguistic relations and word meanings. Teragram has developed and maintains large annotated dictionaries containing several hundred million words in more than 30 languages.

Automatic Categorization

Teragram’s advanced categorization technologies provide instant, advanced classification of documents according to custom criteria, applied throughout the organization. This enables faster and more accurate access to documents organized by specific topics that match the interest of a given user, regardless of the original document’s location.

Natural Language Enterprise Search

For enterprise search, Teragram’s NLP technologies scan structured corporate databases and unstructured sources including text-based reports and Web pages to provide comprehensive answers from these multiple information sources.

“With today’s multinational companies and distributed workforces, as well as tremendous amounts of data in disparate systems and formats, it’s more important than ever to get quick and accurate answers to key business questions,” said Schabes. “Enterprise search is a competitive weapon for tapping an organization’s existing data resources. Combining SAS’ business intelligence, data integration and advanced analytics with Teragram’s NLP technologies will deliver answers to search queries in seconds.”

Teragram’s sophisticated search capabilities deliver an easy-to-use environment for BI, extending the availability and use of BI throughout organizations. The combination of SAS and Teragram technologies provides indexing driven not just by a report’s header, but by its actual content and the metadata associated with it.

Mobile Search

Teragram also brings SAS the next generation of mobile search, helping individuals scan information remotely and get answers faster. Using Teragram’s mobile search technology, individuals can store and retrieve information, connect to outside applications such as BI systems, and search databases from their BlackBerry, smart phone or other mobile device.

An Explosion in Unstructured Data

Business management expert Bill Jensen first decried the downsides of today’s information explosion back in 2001, in his book “Simplicity.” According to his research, echoed by others, the most conservative estimates currently show that business information is doubling every eighteen months. This data flood has only grown more pronounced in recent years, and much of this data lies outside traditional, “structured” databases. According to estimates, unstructured data comprises up to 70% of all business data. This unstructured data resides in customer comments and service notes, e-mail and chat threads, documents and surveys, blogs and RSS feeds, warranty claims, resumes, voicemail and phone logs, among other sources.

If businesses fail to include this unstructured data in their analyses – of customers, market opportunities, internal operations, supply chains, etc. – they are only seeing part of the complete picture, and can make bad decisions as a result. Powerful analytics like SAS’ can help organizations weave structured and unstructured data to uncover hidden patterns and trends, and then use this insight to make better decisions, solve problems and take advantage of opportunities.

SAS: A Pioneer in Text Mining

SAS has offered text mining capabilities within its software for more than a decade, and launched a specific text-mining product, SAS Text Miner, in 2002.

Today, SAS Text Miner is included in several industry-specific solutions, including SAS Warranty Analysis. Manufacturers such as Sub-Zero and Shanghai General Motors use this solution to bring together and analyze warranty claims and service data, much of it unstructured. They can discover potential problems early enough to take quick action, leading to improved product quality and enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Banks use text analytics on transcripts of customer calls and related metadata (such as length of call, hold time, number of transfers) to determine customers’ satisfaction sentiment and predict outcomes (is a customer a good credit risk or are they likely to close an account, for example). Insurance companies use text analytics on adjusters’ claim notes and demographic information to detect possible fraudulent claims.

CIGNA HealthCare is one of the largest health services businesses in the United States and provides medical benefits plans, dental coverage, behavioral health coverage, pharmacy benefits, and products and services that integrate and analyze information to support consumerism and health advocacy.

Providing timely, high-quality service to customers is critical to CIGNA HealthCare. “Using software such as SAS Enterprise BI Server, CIGNA HealthCare’s informatics group can quickly respond to requests from customers, consultants and brokers for in-depth analysis and timely, accurate reporting,” said Tamim Ahmed, Vice President of Informatics and Customer Reporting, CIGNA HealthCare. “Such resources assist us in coordinating access to information, which allows us to improve our member outreach and, through that outreach, improve member health outcomes.”

According to Tamim Ahmed, the SAS BI platform helps CIGNA HealthCare perform data integration, medical analysis and medical management reporting. It helps coordinate member outreach by providing CIGNA’s analysts with more in-depth information on how the company’s new programs affect members and improve their clinical results. This capability supports a number of CIGNA’s products and programs, including the CIGNA Health Advisor program, which provides health and wellness coaching to CIGNA members. The SAS BI platform helps CIGNA integrate and coordinate information more efficiently while maintaining confidentiality and data security.

“SAS Enterprise BI Server combined with SAS’ traditional strengths in data management and analytics have helped strengthen CIGNA HealthCare’s BI platform,” said Sadeque Ahmed, a Senior Informatics Analyst at CIGNA HealthCare.

“The marketing department was forced to operate without a usable query tool,” said Tammy Miles, Senior Manager of Database Marketing at Harry & David. “Creating ad-hoc market analysis reports was a significant burden, and we knew we needed something more. We’ve been using SAS for more than 25 years at Harry & David, and it just made sense for us to stay with SAS. The SAS Enterprise BI Server’s high configurability and ease of use helped us keep the learning curve low. SAS is an ongoing success for us.”

SAS enables Miles’ team to handle requests from corporate staff and merchants who sell Harry & David products directly. “SAS empowers Harry & David marketing analysts to better target our marketing campaigns and vehicles. We can create models and reports in one day rather than over the course of many days,” she said. “This efficiency spills over to other functional areas. For example, valuable IT department resources are no longer diverted from strategic development efforts to pull reports. SAS definitely is worth the investment.”

“Harry & David is the latest end user company to recognize the SAS Business Intelligence platform as comprehensive and easy to use,” said Lori Schafer, Vice President, SAS Global Retail Practice. “We think the recently released Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms*’ underscores Harry & David’s belief that SAS offers superior vision for business intelligence in the retail industry.”

Today’s announcement came at SAS Global Forum, an annual conference attended by more than 3,500 SAS users from around the world.

“As the only combined BI and advanced analytics vendor to run on the mainframe, SAS is clearly committed to helping organizations take advantage of IBM’s application and data access solutions for System z,” said Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc. “The BI market is growing, mainframes are established elements of a company’s technology foundation and leveraging the two together just makes sense for long-term success. Regardless of size, SAS and IBM have declared that they are in it for the long haul – enabling enterprises to perform sophisticated data analysis and other BI functions while protecting and leveraging their mainframe investments.”

As partners for many years, SAS and IBM have continuously worked together to help customers gain the most value from their software and hardware offerings. “SAS has been on the mainframe for 30-plus years, so it only makes sense to ensure that the mainframe can support advances in business intelligence,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SAS. “With the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform running on IBM System z, enterprises can fully leverage their mainframes to be more agile and strategic with management decisions and feel more confident with their overall information management strategy.”

“As business intelligence becomes more mission-critical to System z customers, IBM wants to ensure that they have access to proven, reliable and comprehensive BI platform technology that can meet current and future business needs,” said Florence Hudson, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IBM System z. “We are pleased with the progress that BI vendors, such as SAS, have made in offering our customers the analytics and reporting capabilities they need to cost-effectively and efficiently optimize the value of their operational data on the mainframe.”

The two companies plan to work together to enhance Accenture’s SAS® capabilities and will also team to enhance SAS software and will also team to enhance SAS-based software and product development by leveraging Accenture’s industry expertise. This relationship will help Accenture deliver proven, repeatable solutions and create additional specialized capabilities to meet the increased demand for business intelligence services currently provided to clients through its Accenture Information Management Services (AIMS) organization. For SAS, the relationship will help accelerate growth of the company’s global BI software revenue by leveraging Accenture’s investment in sales, marketing, training, research and development, and expertise in industry and business processes.

“We are clearly seeing an increased demand for business intelligence services as organizations seek higher performance by collecting and analyzing internal and external data,” said Royce Bell, Chief Executive Officer of Accenture Information Management Services. “By striking a closer relationship with a market-leading enterprise business intelligence software vendor, we will be able to provide our clients with even more skills and scale than previously possible.”

“Business intelligence solutions and services are clearly the next growth area in information technology. By leveraging our mutual strengths in software, services and business expertise, we will be better able to take advantage of global strategic BI opportunities,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SAS. “The breadth of SAS’ enterprise intelligence platform and industry focused solutions coupled with Accenture’s ability to provide additional customization, implementation services and global delivery, will allow customers to address key business and technology pains associated with information management more quickly and effectively.”

Accenture and SAS have successfully teamed together over the last 10 years to provide business intelligence solutions in the analytics area where companies are seeking to get more insight and value out of their data. This expanded relationship will help provide a foundation for Accenture and SAS to further develop, market, sell and deliver global industry solutions for businesses via a comprehensive and united approach and set of resources.

According to Henry Morris, Group VP for Integration, Development and Application Strategies at IDC, a leading analyst firm: “This is a positive move for both companies, each with a demonstrated record of success in the field of analytics. SAS’ commitment to industry solutions and an intelligence platform is complemented by Accenture’s capabilities to explain the benefits to senior executives in the language of their vertical industry and to provide the skilled personnel required for delivery. The agreement should benefit both firms and should advance the penetration of analytics across industries and across regions.”

Accenture’s information management practice currently has approximately 10,000 professionals with skills, experience and knowledge related to how information management can support an organization’s strategic vision. Accenture professionals create and deliver complex solutions by drawing on functional and industry know-how, offerings and assets.

Accenture plans to expand its SAS business intelligence capabilities, specifically around the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, which is the foundation for SAS’ targeted business solutions that support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, supply chain intelligence, as well as technology solutions for various vertical markets, such as financial services, life sciences, health care, retail, manufacturing and others.

As product margins dwindle under intense global competition, leading-edge companies are recognizing the ability to harvest more profits through improved forecasting, suspect claim analysis and reduced inventories while maintaining and even improving customer satisfaction levels. They are realizing competitive advantage by improving quality and performance throughout the service chain, and even feeding timely quality reporting back into design and manufacturing.

“Post-sales service ranks among the top three priorities for chief financial officers worldwide, and 68 percent of companies now have a vice president or higher overseeing service performance,” said Mark Vigoroso, Chief Research Officer and Senior Vice President, Service Chain Management, Aberdeen Group. “As best-in-class companies scale their technology investments, the key thing to keep in mind is to partner with a technology provider that not only provides a point solution to meet their most immediate need, but also provides a flexible platform to build on in the future.”

For Shanghai GM, a US$1.5 billion joint venture between General Motors and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., implementing the SAS Warranty Analysis solution two years ago marked the starting point for the company to gain a better understanding of its warranty expenses and its aftermarket service operation. In fact, Shanghai GM served as one of the inspirations for creating the SAS Service Intelligence suite. “We are making constant progress and after six months of using SAS, we are still discovering new ways of improving our warranty analysis process,” said Nanxiang Gao, Warranty Business Representative and Field Performance Engineer within Shanghai GM’s Quality Department. “This also has an impact on the efficiency of our after-sales campaigns because now we know exactly how much money is available for after sales.”

The new Service Intelligence suite helps companies view aftermarket operations holistically to better retain satisfied customers and build brand image. Companies using the suite gain competitive advantage by recognizing the service chain as one of the keys to developing an ongoing reputation of excellence.

For more information about the SAS Service Intelligence suite, please visit http://www.sas.com/solutions/quality/index.html .

Today’s announcement was made at BetterManagement LIVE, a business conference in Las Vegas that brings together more than 1,000 attendees from the public and private sector to share ideas and knowledge on critical business management issues.