SAS Enters Hosted Services Market

SAS Institute Inc. is bringing its data warehousing and business-intelligence expertise to the market for data-analysis services. On Monday, the company unveiled its IntelliVisor hosted service for collecting and analyzing customer data from retail Web sites. The service marks SAS's first foray into the realm of hosted services.

IntelliVisor is designed to help online retailers find out such things as how customers interact with their Web sites, which customers buy which products, and which marketing campaigns are effective in getting customers to buy. Providing these capabilities on a hosted basis lets users gain customer intelligence without big up-front investments in personnel or IT infrastructure.

SAS is competing against a growing number of clickstream-data-analysis service providers, ranging from IBM and its SurfAid offering to smaller companies such as WebSideStory Inc. and Coremetrics Inc. Current Analysis analyst Mike Schiff says IntelliVisor will make SAS's analytical capabilities available to smaller companies. "For the midmarket, this makes sense. They get SAS's domain expertise, but they don't have to buy the hardware or the software," Schiff says.

The IntelliVisor service will collect data from clients' Web logs, analyze the results overnight, and make reports available to clients over the Internet. SAS will operate the system using its own data warehousing and data-analysis software, including Enterprise Miner for data mining, Web Hound for clickstream-data analysis, and Strategic Vision for measuring business performance. EDS will provide the hosting facilities. The cost of the service will hinge on the amount of data involved, with the base price around $20,000 a month.