SAS Aims At E-intelligence Market

SAS Institute Inc. is developing data-collection and data-mining software that will target the growing demand for business-intelligence capabilities in E-commerce. The products, tentatively named Web Hound and Web Mining, are expected early next year.

Web Hound will include the SAS MDDB Server multidimensional database, tools for collecting clickstream data, and reporting facilities for organizing the data and building data marts. Web Mining will add SAS's data warehouse administration software to its Enterprise Miner data mining tool and analytical templates designed for Web-site data. The system will let users combine Web-site information with customer and sales data from other sources, says John McIntyre, SAS's global marketing director.

SAS joins Broadbase, IBM, NetGenesis, and Oracle in developing business-intelligence products for E-business. Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled its Business Internet Analytics initiative to develop technology for E-commerce business intelligence.

AutoTrader.com Inc., which provides online listings of used cars, has been using SAS MDDB to analyze data generated by its Web site, which receives nearly 3 million visitors per month. After consolidating the 10 to 12 Gbytes of data the AutoTrader site generates daily, marketers analyze the information to learn where visitors come from, what ads they view, and what content they read. "There's a tremendous amount of information that we can use to tune our site," said David Lilly, AutoTrader.com's advanced product development VP.