TheOpenAnalyst » R

Intel open-source expert heads to start-up

TheOpenAnalyst — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:35:00 +0000

Danese Cooper, who spent more than three years as senior director of Intel’s open-source strategies, has taken a similar job at Revolution Computing, a start-up that’s commercializing the open-source R programming technology for data analysis.

Cooper, who took on the title of open-source diva at Sun Microsystems before her stint at Intel, plans to help Revolution expand its current community of developers and users to a broader group, she said in an interview. For example, she’ll work on better user groups and new assets to help the community.

Intel open-source expert heads to start-up | Business Tech – CNET News

SAS Gets with the (Open Source) Program

TheOpenAnalyst — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:09:00 +0000

A January New York Times article on the R open-source statistical programming environment catalysed a change in attitude at SAS, the largest independent BI and analytics vendor. In just one month, SAS’s position swerved from disdain — the Times quoted Anne H. Milley, SAS director of technology product marketing, as opining, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.” — to embrace with an admission that “both R and SAS are here to stay, and finding ways to make them work better with each other is in the best interests of our customers.” And that’s good news, for SAS and for R.

The February SAS press release quoted above says an R interface for SAS/IML Studio — IML is the Interactive Matrix Language — is scheduled for release this summer. “‘This is just the first step,’ said Radhika Kulkarni, vice president of advanced analytics. ‘We are busy working on an R interface that can be surfaced in the SAS server or via other SAS clients.’”

SAS Gets with the (Open Source) Program | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts

TheOpenAnalyst — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:40:00 +0000

To some people R is just the 18th letter of the alphabet. To others, it’s the rating on racy movies, a measure of an attic’s insulation or what pirates in movies say.

R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.

R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts | NYTimes.com

SAS Warms to Open-Source One Letter at a Time

TheOpenAnalyst — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:28:00 +0000

The SAS Institute has borrowed a page from Sesame Street. It is now sponsoring the letter ‘R.’

Last month, I wrote an article about the rising popularity of the R programming language. The open-source software has turned into a favorite piece of technology for statisticians and other people looking to pull insights out of data.

On several levels, R represents a threat to SAS, which is the largest seller of commercial statistics software. Students at universities now learn R alongside SAS. In addition, the open-source nature of R allows the software to be tweaked at a pace that is hard for a commercial software maker to match.

SAS Warms to Open-Source One Letter at a Time | Bits Blog – NYTimes.com