Launching under a new name and new leadership, Revolution Analytics recently unveiled its plans to further drive commercial adoption of the open source R statistics language as the foundation for the future of predictive analytics. The company (formerly known as Revolution Computing) outlined its 2010 product roadmap to bring professional-class performance, ‘Big Data’ scalability, productivity and ease-of-use to R.

As part of the launch, Revolution Analytics made two Community-related announcements:

• The Company’s flagship offering, Revolution R Enterprise, is now being offered free-ofcharge to academic users—giving this influential community access to the same fullfeatured production-grade software available to businesses and large organizations.
  
  
• The beta launch of inside-R.org, a new website for the R community, where R users will be able to find and share resources, ideas and tips.
  

With over two million users worldwide, the open source R statistics language has become widely adopted among data analysts, statisticians and researchers for advanced computational analysis. Its power and extensibility has spawned a large and active developer community, which has created thousands of R packages that can implement virtually any known statistical analysis.

“Today, many R users are highly trained statisticians and data analysts who’ve been instrumental in helping evolve the program,” said Robert Gentleman, co-creator of R and board director of Revolution Analytics. “I believe that by fostering a relationship with the open source and academic communities Revolution Analytics can help drive R’s acceptance in mainstream business.”

Norman H. Nie, Ph.D., predictive analytics pioneer and co-founder of SPSS, leads Revolution Analytics in its charge to reinvent a market he helped create. Nie explained: “We’re seeing a perfect storm of forces and opportunities. Businesses are producing unprecedented amounts of data that, if mined fast enough, can arm managers to make smarter decisions and drive winning results. At the same time, students across all disciplines are leaving their universities with an increasing level of R statistical training. This growing army of analysts needs better technology that’s able to handle the explosion of ‘Big Data.’ Revolution Analytics is building upon open source R to deliver the next-generation predictive analytics platform, with advantages in speed, scalability, productivity, ease-of-use and price.”

Revolution Analytics’ 2010 Product Roadmap Revolution Analytics plans to enhance its Revolution R Enterprise offering with the following capabilities over the course of 2010:

• ‘Big Data’ Analysis for Terabyte-Class File Structures: A total solution that combines the use of external memory algorithms, distributed parallel computing, high performance data access and an extensible framework for processing huge datasets in R. A collection of the most common statistical procedures used on big data that are scalable across cores and computers—and are orders of magnitude faster than using legacy tools.
  
  
• Integrated Web Services: A robust programming platform used to deliver R functionality on the Web—one that will support both anonymous R Script execution, and authenticated users working in a stateful environment.
  
  
• Comprehensive Data Analysis GUI: A Web-based user interface that radically improves the usability of R, accelerates productivity and enables rapid learning for both novice and experts. Users will be able to seamlessly transition back and forth between R code and dialogs, and be exposed to only as much R code as they want to see. Built on a fully extensible framework that allows for creating and modifying UI elements (menus, dialogs, outputs), the new GUI lets users customize and extend the UI for their needs.
  
  
• Products and Services to help migrate data and applications from legacy statistical systems to R.
  

SOURCE: Revolution Analytics Unveils the Future of Predictive Analytics with R