SAS Brings BI to the Fight Against Crime, Terrorism 
SAS executives continue their push to bring BI to crime fighting with its acquisition of Memex, a UK-based maker of intelligence management software for law enforcement and homeland security sectors.
SAS executives continue their push to bring BI to crime fighting with its acquisition of Memex, a UK-based maker of intelligence management software for law enforcement and homeland security sectors. 
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said the acquisition of Memex was part of his plan to enhance SAS' BI and analytics offerings for law enforcement, criminal justice, homeland security and intelligence agencies. “I want SAS to be the first company public security organizations call to help them apply analytics to solve crime and protect citizens,” he said in a statement.
SAS will continue to expand capabilities to help law enforcement, justice, homeland security and defense intelligence agencies share and use data more efficiently and effectively across boundaries and departments to help predict and prevent crime, SAS officials added.
“The combination of SAS’ business intelligence and advanced analytic offerings with our enterprise search, information processing and intelligence management offerings for the public security sector is unique within the marketplace,” said Memex CEO David Carrick in the statement. More than 100 commercial and intelligence organizations use Memex to support and develop their intelligence-led operations.
SAS’s On-going Campaign To Bring BI to Crime-Fighting
SAS’s purchase of Memex is the latest in an on-going, multi-year campaign to bring BI and analytics to a variety of security-conscience professionals to fight the use of money laundering, credit card fraud and identity theft by organized crime and terrorist groups.
Recently, SAS Americas Sales Director for the Financial Crimes Business Unit says David Stewart made this case for applying BI and analytics to financial threats:
“No technology has done an exceptional job at detecting terrorism financing, and many tools available today may be considered as racial or ethnic profiling tools that violate civil liberties. However, technology can be used legally to monitor three important areas: high-risk institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) such as charities or nonprofits; sanction lists; and high-risk geographies,” Stewart said.
BI and analytics can play a larger law enforcement role by providing organizations important capabilities, including ability to:
- Scale large volumes of data and monitor all customers and relationships using link analysis, clustering analysis or near-neighbor techniques.
- Support integrated investigation environments to speed up the decision process.
- Score risks and analyze customer behavior across product lines.
- Apply “ad hoc” analysis to BI and analytics, so systems can look back at data, identify trends and learn from those.
“I want SAS to be the first company public security organizations call to help them apply analytics to solve crime and protect citizens,”
Jim Goodnight
CEO
SAS
In a related initiative, SAS also continues to host an Anti-Terrorist Financing Forum, a meeting where more than 200 bankers, regulators and law enforcement personnel meet and share best practices with prominent terrorist financing and anti-money laundering experts.
