Thursday, 27 March 2008

SAS Acquires Teragram, Strengthens Text Mining

Business Intelligence (BI) company SAS has acquired Teragram, a provider of natural language processing (NLP) and advanced linguistic technology in a bid to enhance SAS’ text mining and analytical BI offerings, and extend them to enterprise and mobile search.

“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.”

Once the deal is complete, Teragram--a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass-- will be run as a SAS company.

“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.

Teragram’s customer base includes CNN, Forbes.com, NYTimes Digital, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo!

Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed.