Silicon Graphics Driving Knowledge Discovery Solutions
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Silicon Graphics, Inc. introduced MineSet 2.6, building on the success of its flagship data mining and visualization software. Bolstered by high-performance features that create a truly scalable data mining solution, the evolving MineSet solution is designed to be a compelling means to capitalize on information-rich data warehouses.

"With MineSet 2.6, Silicon Graphics upholds its technological leadership in knowledge discovery by providing our customers with solutions to accelerate time to insight," said Ihab Abu-Hakima, vice president, Strategic Business Analysis Division, Silicon Graphics. "We are keeping rapid pace with global customer demands for attaining real-time decision making in their highly competitive environments. The capabilities of MineSet are enabling companies to realize tremendous efficiencies in their operations."

At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which is renowned for solving critical business problems, MineSet has generated millions of dollars in savings for NCSA's Fortune 500 clients, according to Michael Welge, technical program manager for Research and Development at NCSA.

As companies increasingly move toward terabyte-class data warehouses, MineSet 2.6 has removed the last hurdles for obtaining a truly scalable data mining solution with the first support for both 32- and 64-bit support for large (over 2GB) memory and improved parallelization.

Version 2.6 also reinforces MineSet's position as an open platform solution with a new API plug-in architecture for third-party algorithms, clearing the way for integrating other decision support tools to MineSet. Already, Ultimode, a Berkeley, Calif.-based ISV, has supplied the first add-on -- a clustering algorithm based on the well-known AutoClass algorithm. In addition, the client-side Record Viewer function is now Java-enabled on MineSet 2.6 and facilitates the publishing of MineSet-generated visualizations on the Web.

The new MineSet features also support multi-way associations with record weighting, an especially important capability for users in the retail and financial sectors where market basket analyses are performed. And, in direct response to the product's growing global popularity, MineSet 2.6 provides support for multibyte international characters, allowing users to change locales and connect to databases that have non-English characters.

"We're using MineSet to build applications for one of our clients to analyze over 200 million records (approximately 100GB) stored in an Oracle system on an NT server," stated Michael Kling of Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Inc. "The intuitive user interface of MineSet software, coupled with its fast analytic capability, enables us to reduce the time required to extract meaningful patterns within data. MineSet's ease of use helps us minimize training costs, as well as time to deployment. Additionally, MineSet's seamless integration with leading databases is another important feature that saves us significant time."

Winner of the Bronze Miner Award as the highest rated commercial data mining product at the last Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference, MineSet has sought to redefine the standard in data mining with tighter integration of comprehensive analytical and visualization tools to better serve the needs of business and industry. MineSet users include Andersen Consulting, Bayer AG, Chase Manhattan Corp., Ford Motor Company, General Mills Inc., F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., PricewaterhouseCoopers, Procter & Gamble Co., Texaco Inc. and Zeneca Group PLC.

MineSet 2.6 will be introduced in early October 1998 through Silicon Graphics' worldwide sales, distributor and reseller channels. In the United States, the starting list price for a single server and client license which includes a three-day training course is $25,000. Customers with support licenses are entitled to free upgrades. MineSet is available on all Silicon Graphics systems running the IRIX 6.2 operating system or higher. Parallelization and 64-bit support require IRIX 6.4 or higher. Silicon Graphics is also offering a free, 30-day trial license of regular MineSet, downloadable off the Web.

To acquaint new customers with the software's unique capabilities and power, Silicon Graphics is offering MineSet Light, an entry-level version of MineSet at a fraction of the cost. Including user training, MineSet Light is priced at $3,000 U.S. list. It provides all the standard MineSet features, and automatically samples data up to 5,000 records.

For more information, see http://www.sgi.com/