Revolution Analytics Launches R Enterprise 6.0

Revolution Analytics, a provider of software and services for the open source data analysis and statistics language R, yesterday released an upgrade of its R Enterprise platform, providing users with more ways to handle big data.

R Enterprise 6.0 offers new scalability and performance features that enable users to analyze data on the cloud and within the enterprise in less time, compared to "legacy products," according to a company statement.

"What excites our customers [about this upgrade] is being able to cut down computation times for predictive analytics on big data," comments David Smith, Revolution Analytics' vice president of marketing. As an example Smith pointed to an insurance company that participated in the beta program of the 6.0 version. By using Revolution Analytics' algorithm, the insurance company was able to reduce eight hours of computation time for a data set to 10 minutes, according to Smith. "Their data scientists can now spend more time improving their [data] model instead of waiting for the numbers to crunch," he added.

Highlights of Revolution R Enterprise 6.0 include:

Platform LSF Cluster Support: The platform now supports distributed computing on multinode Platform LSF grids, in association with IBM. It also includes support on Windows-based grids provided via the Microsoft HPC Server.
Cloud-Based Analytics with Azure Burst: Users can switch computations from a local Microsoft Windows HPC Server cluster to the Azure Cloud with a single command.
Big Data Generalized Linear Models: Support for big-data predictive models used in insurance, finance, and biotech industries, providing fast analytics on big data.
Direct Analysis of SAS, SPSS, ASCII, and ODBC Data: Users can analyze proprietary data formats without the need for SAS/SPSS licenses.
Updated R 2.14.2 Engine: Improved performance and parallel programming capabilities. In addition, Revolution Analytics' open-source RHadoop project (for Hadoop integration) is updated to work with this new engine.

The company's customers include Marketo, Kraft Foods, Pfizer, and Visa.