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March 7, 2000 Microsoft and Leading Data Mining Vendors Line Up In Support of Data Mining Specification OLE DB for Data Mining Beta Now Broadly Available

REDMOND, Wash. March 7, 2000 Microsoft Corp. today announced the beta release of the OLE DB for Data Mining specification, a protocol based on the SQL language, that provides software vendors and application developers with an open interface to more efficiently integrate data mining tools and capabilities into line-of-business and e-commerce applications. A dozen leading data mining and business intelligence vendors announced their support for the new protocol, which will enable diverse data mining products to more easily exchange data and results and allow developers to more easily incorporate data mining technology into existing data warehousing solutions. Supporting vendors include ANGOSS Software Corp., AppSource Corp., Comshare Inc., DB Miner Technology Inc., Knosys Inc., Magnify Inc., Megaputer Intelligence Inc., Maximal Innovative Intelligence Ltd., NCR Corp., PolyVista Inc. and SPSS Inc.

"Release of the OLE DB for Data Mining specification is a significant milestone on the path to much wider use of predictive and descriptive analytic models by commercial applications," Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer, Teradata Solutions Group, NCR. "NCR strongly supports this initiative to provide standard mechanisms for deploying analytic models obtained from a variety of sources. We expect significant use of OLE DB for Data Mining Provider Services by our CRM solutions and application products." OLE DB for Data Mining has been under vendor review and modification since its introduction last May at Tech*Ed -99 and now incorporates the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) standards from the Data Mining Group (http://www.dmg.org/), an industry consortium that facilitates the creation of useful standards for the data mining community. PMML is an XML-based language that provides a quick and easy way for organizations to define and share data mining models between compliant vendors' applications.

"By incorporating the PMML standard, Microsoft has further strengthened an open specification for bringing data mining into analytical applications," said Jack Noonan, president and CEO of SPSS. "This means that a much broader group will now have a simple and accessible way to incorporate data mining models into the applications they build, increasing analytical power without increasing complexity." OLE DB for Data Mining extends the SQL language syntax to make data mining capabilities available to any business analyst or developer, without the need for specialized data mining skills. This natural integration into the relational database world enables faster integration of data mining into high-payoff e-commerce application areas, such as site personalization and shopping-cart analysis. The beta specification for OLE DB for Data Mining is currently available at http://www.microsoft.com/data/oledb/ and will be open for public review until May 15, 2000.

For more information, please see http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/

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