SAS has announced the acquisition of privately held Teragram, a natural language processing (NLP) and advanced linguistic technology company.

"The addition of Teragram’s domain expertise and NLP technology will change the landscape of the BI and analytics markets," said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. "Teragram’s technologies augment, strengthen and extend SAS’ ability to combine structured and unstructured data -- not only in our text mining solution but embedded across the entire SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform -- to drive better answers faster."

Teragram, a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., will be run as a SAS company. "As the data explosion continues, companies need an intelligent way to make sense of it all, whether data is in structured databases or in the huge variety of unstructured sources," said Yves Schabes, President of Teragram. "Teragram and its technology fit perfectly into SAS’ analytics and text mining efforts, as SAS continues to innovate in this rapidly growing market. We’re pleased to join a company that delivers the software businesses need to blend structured and unstructured data and reach better, timelier and more accurate decisions."