SAS Institute Acquires Teragram
SAS Institute this week announced the acquisition of Teragram Corporation, a provider of text mining and NLP products.
Slowly but surely, all the BI companies are buying into the text mining market. Business Objects bought Inxight, SPSS bought LexiQuest and later bundled it into their Clementine data mining app. SAS had entered the text mining market a few years ago with the launch of their home-grown SAS Text Miner. Teragram has been a niche player in what remains a niche space, despite vendor efforts to make it a mainstream app.
To-date, none of the business intelligence software companies have shown the ability to closely integrate these unstructured data technologies with their structured data solutions. Part of the challenge for most has been that text analytics software does not provide neat answers the way that their BI dashboards do. It will be interesting to see if the SAS user base, who are accustomed to data mining, are quicker to acclimate to text mining.
While the press release quotes Teragram CEO Yves Schabes stating "Teragram and its technology fit perfectly into SAS' analytics and text mining efforts, as SAS continues to innovate in this rapidly growing market", it's interesting to note that they do not mention any joint customers of the two products. I'm skeptical about how close a fit this really will be.
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