SAS E-Intelligence Analyses Web Traffic, Profiles

SAN MATEO (02/17/2000) - WITH COMPANIES SEEKING to distill useful information on Web site visitors, SAS Institute Inc. at the end of this month will release a series of data-analysis products geared at personalization and click-stream analysis.

Under the e-Intelligence heading, SAS will roll out WebHound, an application that can compile data from Web server logs and summarize it. With consumer-oriented Web sites getting up to several gigabytes of data per day, businesses need a tool to organize and report data for analysis, SAS officials said.

SAS also has built an application, code-named e-Discovery, on top of its Enterprise Miner data-mining software that will let businesses take click stream information garnered from the Web and deliver it via publish-and-subscribe middleware to other applications. For example, based on a customer profile, a Web site will generate a different set of options or ads to that visitor, officials explained.

This ability to profile and segment Web site visitors will become increasingly important in the business-to-business arena as companies sign on to electronic trading exchanges, said John McIntrye, director of marketing strategy at SAS Institute.

"Companies will need some way beyond price to evaluate the risk of doing business with a new supplier," McIntrye said. Historical data of the supplier's ability to ship on time and a measurement of product quality will help.

"In the past you took the time to evaluate suppliers but in e-marketplaces, there may be 40 new suppliers and you don't have a clue who they are," he said.

The third leg of the e-Intelligence initiative is IT Service Vision, an application that ties into systems and network management platforms to measure volume on databases and call centers. By generating performance reports, IT professionals can better predict application load and spot bottlenecks.

The data-mining application e-Discovery costs $200,000, Web Hound costs $80,000, and IT Service Vision is $100,000. Prices include five days of starting services.

SAS Institute Inc., in Cary, N.C., is at http://www.sas.com.

Martin LaMonica is an InfoWorld news editor.