SAS Institute Inc. has signed on Inxight Software Inc. to provide much of the technology behind its forthcoming SAS Text Miner application due for release later this year, as the company makes a move into unstructured data analysis.
The two companies are expected to announce an alliance agreement Monday. It will call for SAS to add Inxights LinguistX Platform, for natural language text analysis, and Inxight Thing Finder, a software product that identifies and extracts desired content from documents, to SAS Text Miner, which is scheduled for release around the middle of this year.
Text Miner will be used to analyze textual or unstructured data from databases, e-mail and the Web. Most data analysis products today, from SAS and other vendors, focus on numerical or structured data.
The agreement with Inxight includes the support of English, French and German, with other language support available separately from Inxight.
“Inxight is the best text mining development partner for us due to its advanced linguistic technology,” said Keith Collins, senior vice president and chief technology officer for SAS, in a statement. Collins, in Cary, N.C., said Inxights products would add such capabilities as text pre-processing, concept extraction, data dictionaries and multiple language recognition to Text Miner.
Inxight president and CEO John Laing said in a statement that unstructured data typically accounts for 85 percent of a companys information.
“Most of this data is not available for search, retrieval or analysis,” said Laing, in Santa Clara, Calif. “Inxights proven expertise in linguistic technology coupled with SAS 25 years of experience in developing analytic solutions will give customers the ability to access and utilize the important textual information that was not readily available to them before.”