SAS Teragram in Marketing Push
March 25, 2010
Two readers on two different continents sent me links to write ups about SAS Teragram. As you may know, SAS has been a licensee of the Inxight technology for various text processing operations. Business Objects bought Inxight, and then SAP bought Business Objects. I was told a year or so ago that there was no material change in the way in which SAS worked with Inxight. Not long after I heard that remark, SAS bought the little-known specialist content processing firm, Teragram. Teragram, founded by Yves Schabes and a fellow academic, landed some big clients for the firm’s automated text processing system. These clients included the New York Times and, I believe, America Online.
Teragram has integrated its software with Apache Lucene, and the company has rolled out what it calls a Sentiment Analysis Manager. The idea behind sentiment analysis is simple. Process text such as customer emails and flag the ones that are potential problems. These “problems” can then be given special attention.
The first news item I received from a reader was a pointer to a summary of an interview with Dr. Schabes on the Business Intelligence network. Like ZDNet and Fierce Media, these are pay-for-coverage services. The podcasts usually reach several hundred people and the information is recycled in print and as audio files. The article was “Teragram Delivers Text Analytics Solutions and Language Technologies.” You can find a summary in the write up, but the link to the audio file was not working when I checked it out (March 24, 2010, at 8 am Eastern). The most interesting comment in the write up in my opinion was:
Business intelligence has evolved from a field of computing on numbers to actually computing on text, and that is where natural language processing and linguistics comes in… Text is a reflection of language, and you need computational linguistics technologies to be able to turn language into a structure of information. That is really what the core mission of our company is to provide technologies that allow us to treat text at a more elaborate level than just characters, and to add structure on top of documents and language.
The second item appeared as “SAS Text Analytics, The Last Frontier in the Analysis of Documents” in Areapress. The passage in that write up I noted was this list of licensees:
Associated Press, eBay, Factiva, Forbes.com, Hewlett Packard, New York Times Company, Reed Business Information, Sony, Tribune Interactive, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, Yahoo! and the World Bank.
I am not sure how up to date the list is. I heard that the World Bank recently switched search systems. For more information about Teragram, navigate to the SAS Web site. Could this uptick in SAS Teragram marketing be another indication that making sales is getting more difficult in today’s financial climate?
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2010
A no fee write up. I will report this sad state of affairs to the IMF, which it appears is not clued in like the World Bank.
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