SAS Buys Teragram Corporation
March 17, 2008
SAS Institute Inc. (Cary, North Carolina) announced today that it had acquired Teragram “to strengthen industry-leading text mining, analyticss”. Teragram, founded in 1997 by two technology wizards from Luxembourg. I’m working to chase down more details of the deal. SAS (a tight-lipped, privately-owned company best known for its industrial-strength analytics) seems like an ideal owner of the low-profile, privately-held firm with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Among the capabilities SAS highlighted in its announcement today are Teragram’s functionality; specifically:
- Natural language processing
- Automatic categorization
- Enterprise search
- Mobile search.
When Inxight Software was gobbled up by Business Objects (another analytics outfit), I had a hunch SAS would rethink its use of the Inxight tools. SAS was in a difficult position because a competitor or semi-competitor was in a position to make life somewhat uncomfortable. Then SAP, the German software giant, bought Business Objects. SAS had to take action in order to increase its degrees of text analytics freedom. With Teragram, SAS has options and some interesting technology.
Look for a summary of Teragram’s technology. In Beyond Search, I decided not to include this company. Rumors about a change at Teragram surfaced earlier this year. I have learned that rewriting studies to adapt to the acquisitions and business failures is not much fun.
If you want a jump start on Teragram’s customers, click here. To check out Teragram’s explanation of its rules-based approach to content processing, click here. I will cover this particular aspect of Teragram’s technology in another essay.
More buy outs are looming. With the deepening financial morass in the US, I also believe some of the weaker search and content processing firms are going to turn off their lights. The cost of developing, innovating, and maintaining text processing technology is far greater than most people know.
SPSS — a direct competitor — acquired LexiQuest Inc., a linguistics-based text mining system developer. SPSS, therefore, took control of its text mining and analytics fate with this 2002 purchase. Licensing technology yields some significant benefits. When a technology provider goes belly up or is purchased by a competitor, the happy face can morph into a frown quickly.
Stay tuned. More Teragram information will appear in a day or two.
Stephen Arnold, March 17, 2008
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