Oracle Acquires Data Mining Business of Thinking Machines Corporation

Oracle Corp. has announced the acquisition of the data mining business from Thinking Machines Corp., a leading provider of advanced data mining software for predicting customer behavior. The acquisition will extend Oracle's data warehouse platform and business intelligence solution to include enterprise reporting, ad hoc query, advanced analysis and mining software based on a common Internet platform. The data mining software will also become an integral feature of Oracle's customer relationship management (CRM) suite, which will facilitate the implementation of e-business solutions developed by Oracle customers. In addition to the software technology, Oracle will receive rights to the domain names think.com and thinkingmachines.com.

Founded in 1983, Thinking Machines Corporation revolutionized high-performance computing with its massively parallel supercomputing technology. The company has evolved to focus exclusively on its Darwin data mining software for database marketing in the financial services and telecommunications industries. Darwin analyzes massive volumes of customer transaction, demographic, and psychographic data, which can often amount to hundreds of millions of customer data records. These advanced analyses help companies profile and target customers with greater accuracy, reduce customer attrition, assess customer profitability, cross-sell to existing customers, and detect fraud.

"Data mining has become a critical feature for many applications including e-business and CRM," said Michael Howard, Oracle's vice president for data warehousing. "Thinking Machines has the most precise and scalable data mining software technology on the market, and their parallel software roots are a perfect match for Oracle. We expect to significantly expand the reach of data mining into Oracle's key markets."

The Internet has resulted in an explosion of data available to supplement internal systems. Demographic information has become a prerequisite to many analyses, and is often used in combination with internal data that tracks every aspect of a customer's interaction with a supplier. The proliferation of this data has made it difficult or impossible for many companies to manually sift through the information. Data mining and knowledge discovery techniques are valuable for not only analyzing past behavior but also predicting future behavior.

"Now that the compelling benefits of data mining have expanded its popularity, executives are placing higher demands on the depth and breadth of information garnered from corporate data warehouses," stated Robert Doretti, president and CEO of Thinking Machines. "Darwin, Thinking Machines' data mining software engine, now allows these data warehouses to become highly productive customer information repositories."

Darwin puts powerful data mining techniques in the hands of general business users and experienced analysts alike. Easy to use wizards automate data mining, while providing advanced users with full control over all options and parameters. Darwin combines advanced analytics -- including neural networks, decision trees, and memory-based reasoning -- with unmatched power and price performance. The one-button model-code generation, powerful scripting language and robust software development kit bring predictive forecasting capabilities to sales, call center, marketing and collections organizations. Darwin runs on Sun and HP servers and exports data mining models in C, C++ and Java for execution within Oracle databases. A Windows NT release is planned for later this year.

Oracle Corporation is a leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. With annual revenues of more than $8.3 billion, the company offers its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting, education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the world.