SAS acquires Teragram to Strengthen Text mining and Analytics

SAS announced the acquisition of privately held Teragram. The acquisition will enhance SAS' own text mining and analytical BI offerings, and extend them to enterprise and mobile search. Teragram, a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., will be run as a SAS company. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. Teragram's natural language processing (NLP) technologies help turn text - in many languages and from many sources - into useable information. NLP enables richer data processing at the level of words, linguistic relations and word meanings. Teragram has developed and maintains large annotated dictionaries containing several hundred million words in more than 30 languages. Teragram's categorization technologies provide instant classification of documents according to custom criteria, applied throughout the organization. For enterprise search, Teragram's NLP technologies scan structured corporate databases and unstructured sources including text-based reports and Web pages to provide answers from these multiple information sources. Teragram's search capabilities deliver an easy-to-use environment for BI, extending the availability and use of BI throughout organizations. The combination of SAS and Teragram technologies provides indexing driven not just by a report's header, but by its actual content and the metadata associated with it. Teragram also brings SAS mobile search, helping individuals scan information remotely and get answers faster. Using Teragram's mobile search technology, individuals can store and retrieve information, connect to outside applications such as BI systems, and search databases from their BlackBerry, smart phone or other mobile device. http://www.sas.com, http://www.teragram.com/