SAS Placed in Gartner Data Mining Report

SAS, a privately-owned CRM vendor, has announced that it is positioned in the Leaders quadrant in Gartner (News - Alert) Inc.'s Customer Data Mining 2007 Magic Quadrant.

According to the Gartner report, "leaders are vendors whose performance excels in the customer data mining market."

SAS (News - Alert) officials say the company ploughed 24 percent of its revenue back into research and development in 2006, and that in data mining, SAS "continues to strengthen its capabilities and integrate them further into the SAS Customer Intelligence suite of products."

Major focus areas include improving usability and easing the deployment of analytic insights into a wide range of systems.

Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS, said the Cary, North Carolina-based vendor is "adding more automation to our data mining and analytical offerings."

Users will have the flexibility to apply new automated classifiers and variable selection techniques with the ability to customize the model development process at any stage, SAS officials say. New interactive data preparation and exploration tools will also be added to help better discover trends and anomalies and speed the data preparation process.

Coming this fall, SAS Real-Time Decision Manager will let firms combine SAS Analytics with business logic. The product will deliver real-time recommendations for the Web and other interactive customer channels, company officials say.

In February SAS officials credited "strong demand for industry-specific and packaged products" for the 30^th straight year of revenue growth for the CRM analytics vendor.

Total revenue in 2006 was $1.9 billion, up 12 percent over $1.7 billion in 2005, SAS has announced. New software license revenue increased 20 percent, nearly twice the growth rate expected in the market this year.

The results "validate the new course we set for the company several years ago when we began investing heavily in business and industry-focused applications built on an enterprise intelligence platform," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.

Industry and packaged business products were up 49 percent over 2005, SAS officials said. Goodnight added that "one of our core strengths, powerful predictive analytics, continued to represent a significant stream of revenue at 19 percent growth."

Sales of business intelligence and data integration/warehousing were each up by nearly 50 percent.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) Net.  For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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