Leading business-analytics software and services company SAS is aiming to continue its meteoric 44-per-cent business growth in Thailand this year by expanding the use of its analytics software in the banking, telecom, government and automotive sectors.

In global terms, SAS is marking 35 years of continuous revenue, customer and employee growth. From humble beginnings at North Carolina State University in 1976, it has grown to fill a 364-hectare collegiate-style campus and more than 400 offices around the world.

SAS Southeast Asia's regional director Sudipta K Sen said the company would focus more on Asia Pacific this year, especially on high-growth countries like China, India, Singapore and Thailand.

He said Thailand's economic growth - which was expected to continue this year -was a key factor driving the need for analytic software and solutions. Another driving factor is the high growth of social media in Thailand, which increases the huge quantity of unstructured data that businesses need to analyse.

SAS's social-media analytic software is designed to act on intelligence gleaned from online conversations on professional and consumer-generated media sites. It enables organisations to attribute online conversations to specific parts of their business, allowing accelerated responses to shifts in the market place.

The solution analyses conversation data, identifies advocates of, and threats to, corporate reputation and brand and quantifies interaction among traditional media campaigns and social-media activity. Businesses can use it to establish a platform for social customer-relationship management strategy.

"Currently, analytic software is working on structured data, since there is more structured data than unstructured. But the growth of unstructured data is quite a lot higher than that of structured data. We offer social-media analytics to help businesses deal with this kind of data, which is driven by the high growth of social-media adoption. It is growing four-times faster than structured data," Sen said.

Social-media analytics can help to enhance market research by continuously monitoring online and social-conversation data to identify important topics and content categories, and working out how these topics and categories are relevant to customers in the context of their online communities.

It can also analyse professionally-generated media, such as articles, and consumer-generated media, such as blogs, offering an early-warning system to identify influences both good and bad on corporation, organisation and brand.

By analysing online social-media sources, marketers can understand how to reach consumers through improved behavioural targeting, media buying and planning.

The analytic software establishes a platform for social CRM strategy by merging market data (blogs) and customer data (surveys or Web forms), helping market researchers to determine a consumer need or sentiment shared across a customer base or market.

"We expect to see continued double-digit growth in Thailand this year and to have many more customers. We are confident in Thailand's economic and market growth," Sen said.