French software analysts Yphise have rated SAS Enterprise Miner software the best data mining software on the market for 1998. SAS Institute also won this award in 1997.
Yphise conducted an independent, in-depth evaluation of 7 data mining products; SAS Enterprise Miner, IBM's Intelligent Miner, SPSS, SLP's Statlab, Alice, Datamind Datacruncher and Silicon Graphics' Mineset.
The products were evaluated on 7 criteria; data management, descriptive models, explanatory models, environment, predictive models, application integration and administration and tracking. SAS Enterprise Miner rated higher than the other 6 products in all 7 criteria and received particularly high scores in the areas of data management, descriptive models and explanatory models.
Data mining lets companies explore large quantities of data to discover relationships and patterns that lead to proactive decision-making. SAS Institute customers use data mining in areas as diverse as customer relationship management (customer acquisition and retention, cross selling, market-basket analysis), fraud detection and credit scoring.
Data mining tools have historically been designed for statisticians but increasingly, business analysts who are not trained statisticians are needing to work with data mining techniques. SAS Enterprise Miner software provides a drag-and-drop GUI (graphical user interface) that put sophisticated data mining techniques at the fingertips of both business analysts and quantitative experts alike.
For the IT departments that support data mining tools, SAS Enterprise Miner is part of an integrated end-to-end environment, spanning the entire information delivery process, from data access, data structuring (through a data warehouse), data mining and information distribution. The end-to-end approach ensures that the corporate data required for mining can be made available through a data warehouse to end-users, who are then also able to distribute the results of their data mining activities to different types of people throughout the organisation.
Data access and data warehousing capabilities are particularly important to successful data mining since the results of data mining activities can only be considered of value if they represent all of the required corporate data. Access to this corporate data is a major stumbling block to data mining, and other decision-support activities, in many organisations. SAS Institute is the only data mining software vendor to provide integrated data mining AND data warehousing capabilities.
IT analysts, the META Group recognised the value of SAS Institute's end-to-end approach. Dr Wolfgang Martin says, "SAS/Warehouse Administrator software (SAS Institute's data warehouse management software) provides a single and comprehensive point of control over all the processes involved in creating, maintaining and exploiting enterprise-wide data warehouses and distributed data marts. The seamless integration of the new SAS Enterprise Miner with the Warehouse Administrator offers a powerful combination that will help organisations to find answers to their most pressing business questions."
Editors Note
About Yphise
Since 1985 in Europe and 1996 in North America, Yphise has been committed to providing the most relevant and accurate advice to assist large companies in embracing IT changes. Over 1,000 large companies are Yphise customers worldwide, in all business areas: manufacturing, banking, insurance, retail sales, transportation, services, and government.
Yphise focuses on seven areas.
- IT department total quality and service management.
- E-commmerce.
- Application development and management.
- Teamwork and knowledge management.
- Business intelligence.
- Operation management.
- Technical architecture and security.
About SAS Institute
Now in its 22nd year, SAS Institute is one of the top ten largest independent software vendors in the world, and is the largest privately held software company. The leading provider of data warehousing and decision-support software, the Institute has won DM Review's 1997 Data Acquisition/Delivery award for Data Warehousing. Other awards include the reader-selected 1996 and 1997 Datamation magazine Data Warehousing Product of the Year award, the 1997 Database Programming & Design Database Dozen award, and Software Magazine's Editor's Choice award for decision-support.
SAS Institute provides an integrated suite of information-delivery tools that allow companies to transform the wide variety of data within their organization into information that business users need to make decisions. To make data useful, SAS software collects data from almost every platform and data format; cleans and transforms data into information that users will understand; and stores that information in an open and efficient data warehouse structure.
To explore that information, SAS software includes OLAP, query and reporting, EIS, data mining, analysis, data visualization, and application-development interfaces. SAS software is client/server and Web enabled. SAS Institute also delivers business solutions that are complete packages for financial consolidation and reporting, clinical trials analysis, oil and gas analysis and IT service management. Currently, SAS software and business solutions are being used at more than 31,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 120 countries.
Please visit SAS Institute's Web site: www.sas.com
SAS is a registered trademark, and SAS Enterprise Miner is a trademark of SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All other tradenames referenced are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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