SAS is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in the "Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining, 1Q06" report* by Gartner, Inc. Leaders are vendors whose performance excels in the customer data mining market segment. Not only are they suitable for the majority of enterprises to consider today, but they also have a significant impact on the direction and growth of the market.

Customer data mining is the application of descriptive and predictive analytics (such as clustering, segmentation, estimation, prediction and affinity analysis) to support the marketing, sales and service functions. The focus of the Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining, 1Q06 is on vendors that offer the most-relevant and compelling solutions in the market. SAS' data mining solution, SAS Enterprise Miner, and text mining solution, SAS Text Miner, were evaluated by Gartner for this Magic Quadrant.

SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS' enhanced data mining software, streamlines the entire data mining process from data access to model deployment by supporting all necessary tasks within a single, integrated solution, all while providing the flexibility for efficient workgroup collaborations.

SAS Text Miner expands these data mining capabilities to distill value from vast deposits of textual data. Integrating text-based information with structured data enriches predictive modeling results and provides new and valuable insights for driving business and research initiatives forward.

SAS' award-winning data mining solutions also are available as part of SAS Customer Intelligence. The software enables organizations to find and retain profitable customers using demographic data, customer buying patterns and other data. The software allows organizations to segment markets and to identify best prospects for a targeted approach enabling tailored campaigns that dramatically increase response rates. Data and text mining help solve a variety of problems, improving production process quality, for example, by anticipating problems before they occur and assessing the risk of customer credit applications to balance risk exposure and profitability.

Using the SAS Intelligence Platform as a foundation, SAS offers targeted business solutions that support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, financial intelligence, supply chain intelligence and more -- as well as turnkey solutions for various vertical markets, such as financial services, life sciences, health care, retail, manufacturing and others.