by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson recently wrote an article about R, “a de facto standard among statisticians for developing statistical software, and therefore widely used for data analysis.” According to Lawson, “The concept of ‘Big Data’ is catching on quickly in business, and what’s interesting to me is learning about the tools and technologies that can help companies use Big Data to push the boundaries of business analytics. ‘R’ is one of those tools, and by tools I mean only in the loosest sense of the word. R is actually an open source programming language and software environment that’s used for statistical computing and graphics.”
Lawson continues, “R is also one of those tech things that’s found a home in academia, but not the enterprise, but that’s quickly starting to change, in part because software vendors are starting to offer tools designed for enterprise use. Revolution Analytics is working hard to change that.”
David Champagne, CTO of Revolution Analytics had this to say about the company’s new R-based tool, RevoDeployR: “What we’ve built is a collection of Web services that allows an application to tap into the power of R being able to execute predefined scripts that do some analysis and return artifacts of execution like plots or tables or summary information. So the stack that we’ve built really enables interactive Web applications to take advantage of R in a consistent way, or desktop applications like Excel to integrate and take advantage of R or any other kind of business intelligence applications that need advanced analytics and being able to use R and bring those results back to their end users so that they can get more meaning from their data.”
