Briefs

Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, Oct 27, 2009

If SAS Institute CEO Jim Goodnight is feeling pressured by IBM's recent US$1.2 billion purchase of rival predictive analytics vendor SPSS, he's not showing it.

"I haven't noticed much difference, really, since IBM bought them," he said in an interview Tuesday at SAS' Cary, North Carolina, campus. "We have competed with SPSS for 35 years. We've competed with IBM that same amount of time. Nothing really new competitively has taken place as far as we're concerned."

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Meanwhile, SAS is planning to showcase its predictive analytics wares during a customer event in Las Vegas Wednesday.

One SAS package is supposed to help debt-collection operations. It can be used to develop customer models showing which means of contact is best for various types of debtors. For example, companies could use it to make sure live collections agents focus on people who are the most likely to actually pay back some money, given the expense of running a call center.

The National Hockey League's Carolina Hurricanes are using another "optimization" software application from SAS to determine how to price game tickets, said Bill Nowicki, director of ticket operations, during a panel discussion Tuesday at SAS headquarters.

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