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Revolution Analytics

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Revolution Analytics
Company typePrivate
IndustryStatistical software
PredecessorREvolution Computing
Headquarters
Palo Alto, CA
,
United States
Key people
Norman Nie
ProductsRevolution R
Revenue8-11 Million in 2009
Websitewww.revolutionanalytics.com

Revolution Analytics (formerly REvolution Computing) is a statistical software company focused on developing "open-core"[1] versions of the free and open source software R for enterprise, academic and analytics customers. Revolution Analytics was founded in 2007 as REvolution Computing providing support and services for R in a model similar to Red Hat's approach with Linux in the 1990s as well as bolt-on additions for parallel processing. In 2009 the company received nine million in venture capital from Intel along with a private equity firm and named Norman H. Nie as their new CEO. In 2010 the company announced the name change as well as a change in focus. Their core product, Revolution R, would be offered free to academic users and their commercial software would focus on big data, large scale multiprocessor (or "high performance") computing, and multi-core functionality.

Founding and venture capital

REvolution Computing was founded in New Haven, Connecticut in 2007, spun off from Yale University's computer science department.[2][3] Adding parallel computing to R allowed the company to net large gains in speed for many common analytics operations and early clients like Pfizer took advantage of REvolution R to see large performance gains using R on computing clusters.[4] While the improvements to core R were released under the GNU Public License (GPL), REvolution provides support and services to customers of their commercial product and had considerable early success with life sciences and pharmaceutical companies.[5][6] A year later the company opened an additional office in Seattle.[7]

In 2009 REvolution Computing accepted nine million dollars in venture capital from Intel and North Bridge Venture Partners, a private equity firm. Intel had previously supported REvolution Computing with venture capital in 2008.[8] A number of Intel employees also joined Revolution Analytics as employees or as advisors.[4] Concurrently, the company changed their name to Revolution Analytics and invited Norman Nie, founder of SPSS, to serve as CEO.[9][10] This change in management corresponded with a movement toward building a more complete set of software for commercial users; prior to 2009 Revolution had been focused on building parallel processing functionality into the then mostly single threaded R.[11]

High performance computing, big data and the shift to analytics

Unlike analytics products offered by SAS Institute, R does not natively handle datasets larger than main memory. In 2010 Revolution Analytics introduced RevoScaleR, a package for Revolution R Enterprise designed to handle big data through a high-performance disk-based data store called XDF (not related to IBM's Extensible Data Format) and high performance computing across large clusters.[12] The release of RevoScaleR marked a push away from consulting and services alone to custom code and a la carte package pricing.[13] RevoScaleR also works with Apache Hadoop and other distributed file systems and Revolution Analytics has partnered with IBM to further integrate Hadoop into Revolution R.[14][15] Packages to integrate Hadoop and MapReduce into open source R can also be found on the community package repository, CRAN.[16][17]

Market position

In comparison to IBM (owners of SPSS, the analytics tool developed by Norman Nie and others) and SAS, Revolution Analytics is a small company. In 2009 SAS reported 2.3 billion dollars in revenue while Revolution Analytics estimated sales of 8 to 11 million.[18] According to Nie, this disparity is rapidly shifting as researchers and academics focus more on R and less on SAS or SPSS.[19] Advantages of R over SAS (for both the free and commercial versions of R) include flexibility and extensibility.[20] In contrast to SAS, STATA or SPSS, R is a full featured programming language.[21] Revolution Analytics also hopes to compete on price as well as speed with SAS and other proprietary analytics tools.[22][23] Community vice president David Smith suggested that movement away from "black box" analytics toward open source tools in general supported vendors like Revolution over solely proprietary tools.[24]

Products

Revolution Analytics offers licenses for single user and server versions of Revolution R Enterprise. Single user licenses for academic users as well as users competing in Kaggle data mining competitions are free.[25][26]

References

  1. ^ Blankenhorn, Dana. "Revolution rebooting R with name change and new strategy". ZDNet. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  2. ^ Bogdon, Steve. "One-on-One with David Smith". Dashboard Insight. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
  3. ^ Leidel, John. "Revolution Analytics Defines The Future of R-Statistics". InsideHPC. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
  4. ^ a b Shankland, Stephen. "Intel open-source expert heads to start-up". cnet News. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  5. ^ Vance, Ashlee (8 January 2009). "R You Ready for R?". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  6. ^ Davies, Kevin (14 July 2008). "The New England Computing Revolution". Bio-IT World Magazine. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  7. ^ "REvolution Computing expands senior management team, opens west coast headquarters in Seattle". Revolution Analytics press release. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
  8. ^ "Intel capital makes series a investment in REvolution Computing—investment highlights Intel capital's open source incubator program". Revolution Analytics press release. Retrieved 31 August 2011.
  9. ^ Rao, Leena. "REvolution Computing Raises $9 Million". TechCrunch. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  10. ^ Higginbotham, Stacey (2 February 2011). "The Data Whisperer: Norman Nie of Revolution Analytics". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  11. ^ Prickett Morgan, Timothy. "Open source R in commercial Revolution". The Register. Retrieved 1 September 2011.
  12. ^ Gardner, Dana. "Revolution Analytics targets R language, platform at growing need to handle 'big data' crunching challenges". ZDNet. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  13. ^ Morgan, Timothy Prickett (3 August 2010). "Revolution lets R to stats on big data". The Register. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  14. ^ Harris, Derrick (14 March 2011). "IBM Creates Big Data Frankenstein With Netezza-R Fusion". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  15. ^ Rosenberg, Dave. "Open-source 'R' gets Hadoop integration". cnet News. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  16. ^ Smith, David. "Hadoop ported to R (and it's trivial)". Revolutions. Revolution Analytics. Retrieved 1 September 2011.
  17. ^ Brown, Christopher. "Package:mapReduce". CRAN. The R Project. Retrieved 1 September 2011.
  18. ^ Xavier, Jon (15 August 2010). "Revolution Analytics wants to overthrow old statistical tools". Silicon Valley Business Journal. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  19. ^ Hardy, Quentin (24 May 2010). "Power in the Numbers". Forbes Magazine. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  20. ^ McNally, Steve. "Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software". Forbes. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  21. ^ Olds, Dan. "'R' is for Revolution Analytics". The Register. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  22. ^ Lawson, Lorraine. "Another Tool for Analyzing Big Data". IT Business Edge. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  23. ^ Hardy, Quentin. "Another Open Source Swipe at IBM and SAS". Forbes. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  24. ^ Bodkin, Ron. "Revolution Analytics - Commercializing R for Statistics". InfoQ. Retrieved 14 July 2011.
  25. ^ "Free single user subscription to Revolution R Enterprise". Revolution Analytics website. Retrieved 2 September 2011.
  26. ^ Finley, Klint. "Revolution Analytics Offers Free Software for Kaggle Competitors". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved 14 July 2011.

Further reading

  • Revolutions, the Revolution Analytics blog
  • About page for Revolution Analytics
  • Interview with Revolution Analytics COO Jeff Erhardt about R, Hadoop and business analytics
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