Revolution Analytics to Take R Language Mainstream

Revolution Analytics today will announce Revolution R Enterprise, one of the first commercial implementations of a framework for building analytic applications using the open source R language.

Led by Norman Nie, a co-founder of SPSS that was acquired by IBM, Revolution Analytics plans to provide a high speed analytics environment built around the open source R language. Implementations on analytics applications using the R language today tend to involve small data sets because in its current form, the R language becomes quickly memory-bound.

Revolution Analytics chief operating officer Jeff Erhardt said the R language implementation from Revolution Analytics will solve this problem using new algorithms and a new file structure that leverage parallelism across multicore processors.

Erhardt also said that Revolution Analytics intends to create an open interface that will integrate its analytics application with data warehouses and business intelligence applications.

Because the Revolution Analytics environment leverages an open source language, Erhardt said that the company’s offering will be priced well below rival offerings from companies such as SAS Institute or IBM that rely on proprietary languages. Many of the providers of those applications have recently added support for the R language to their environments, but Erhardt contends that the offering from Revolution Analytics will be the first environment built from the ground up to optimize the R language for commercial analytic applications.