Vision Systems + Technology, Inc.

CARY, NC  (Jul. 16, 2010)    SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, has acquired Vision Systems & Technology Inc. (VSTI). Headquartered in Ellicott City, MD, VSTI is a professional services company that has been delivering advanced analytic solutions to the US intelligence community (IC) for over a decade.

There is an explosion of data in the IC, and threats to national security are rapidly evolving. The time it takes to deploy analytics needs to be reduced to help the IC manage that data and stay a step ahead. According to Vision 2015 , a report created by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "Information overload already presents a profound challenge to our business model. Given these challenges, the analytic community has no choice but to pursue major breakthroughs in capability."

"The IC is challenged with rapidly evolving security threats that urgently demand the application of advanced analytics," said Karen Knowles, General Manager of SAS Federal LLC. "VSTI's deep domain knowledge and analytics expertise in the IC, combined with SAS' industry-leading advanced analytics, will help lead to quicker deployment of solutions - solutions that can weed through massive amounts of data quickly to identify the most relevant information. This will help speed predictive analysis and decision making that can ultimately defeat and deter threats and save lives."

Founded in 1997, VSTI is an industry-leading provider of advanced software systems that assist with high-volume contextual data reduction, analytic discovery, information dissemination, and alerting of the intelligence analysis within the US federal government IC. In addition to the IC, customers include the US Department of Defense, Navy, Air Force and the state of Maryland Consulting and Technical Services.

VSTI CEO Dwayne Robinson, who will report to Knowles, will continue to lead a team of over 60 experienced technologists. "By joining the SAS family, VSTI reinforces the value it places on its workforce and technology excellence. It's an opportunity for VSTI's highly regarded personnel to become part of a leading-edge analytics software company that values people as its most important asset."

The VSTI acquisition strengthens SAS' ability to deliver solutions to the public security market and closely follows last month's acquisition of Memex, a Glasgow, Scotland-based firm specializing in solutions that enhance public safety and prevent and deter crime.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know^® .

February 2010 - VSTI has been performing significant research in the areas of visualization, semantic labeling, data fusion, streaming analytics and automated reasoning. Ed Swing is VSTI's leading expert in semantic technologies and visualization. Mr. Swing is an award winning software engineer at VSTI who's recent research, "Adding Automated Reasoning to the Visual Analysis Process", was recognized and published by IEEE in the IEEE ComputerGraphics publication.

January 2010 - Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. proposed the "BattleSpace Luminary System (BLS)" and was awarded a Phase I SBIR for the Office of Naval Research research topic entitled "Semantic Wiki for Page Alerting". The goal of the SBIR is to retrieve information from a variety of data sources, including news articles, military and intelligence messages, and similar media. Using semantic extraction and reasoning, it will compose information into semantic wiki pages. These pages will provide both current factual information and communally-created content about military targets, terrorist threats, or other vital information. The BattleSpace Luminary System also will transmit alerts to commanders or watch officers when the system detects a change in status for particular targets.

January 2010 - Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. proposed the "AcqKnowledge System" and was awarded a Phase I SBIR for the Air Force research topic entitled "Persistent Queries for Evolving Situational Awareness of Organizational Entities". The goal of the SBIR is to derive crucial knowledge concerning the acquisition of government goods or services. Ranging from contracting compliance to military munitions, this system will extract information from public websites and government data repositories. Through this system, acquisition officers will easily verify whether a particular organization is compliant with criteria for a particular request, or military supply officers could locate needed munitions.

2009 - Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. emerged as the first technology contractor to deliver an operational production system to the Department of Defense capable of real-time content-specific detection and alerting for intelligence analysts. The VSTI Streaming Analytics Framework is capable of identifying actionable intelligence hidden in billions of structured or unstructured data records, in minutes. Today, the system provides analytic services to over 1,000 intelligence analysts, including significant support to deployed field analysts supporting war efforts around the world. The underlying technical concept for this content filtering and alert solution has broad applications.

Dec. 3, 2008 -Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. was a member of SAIC's winning team on a Department of Defense contract.

Sept. 15, 2008 - Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. was awarded a 3-year prime contract by the Department of Defense to develop and support an operational, real-time detection and analysis system. Under a DoD contract, VSTI will provide complete turnkey support to enhance the architecture and deliver an innovative real-time data processing, pattern detection and alert response system while also maintaining the capability to respond quickly to rapidly changing environments.

Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. employee Edward Swing was recognized as a winner in the Cell Phone Calls Challenge held at the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) conference. Swing, a Principal Technology Consultant at VSTI, was given an Effective Toolkit Integration award for his entry in the competition in which 22 teams submitted entries. "Ed put considerable thought into his submissions for the contest," notes VSTI CEO and founder Dwayne Robinson, "and we're incredibly proud of his accomplishment." Swing, who also developed entries for other challenges at the VAST conference, will participate on a panel at the group's next conference, and will demonstrate techniques he developed for the contest at a special interactive session.

Aug. 7, 2008 - Aug. 7, 2008 — VSTI announced today that the firm has been selected as an Hewlett Packard (HP) Protégé company in the Department of Defense's Mentor-Protégé Program. The prestigious program is designed to help small businesses (Protégés) successfully compete for prime contract and subcontract awards by partnering with large companies (Mentors) under individual, project-based agreements.

Jan. 25, 2008 — The United States Air Force today announced that it has awarded a Phase II SBIR contract to Vision Systems & Technology, Inc. for Managed Information Delivery to Multiple Devices.