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Providing adequate software and tools for researchers has always been of great importance to organizations, but has often come at a great cost. In an era of constantly evolving technology and rapidly dwindling budgets, my IT team has had to work with a large pool of researchers to provide cost-effective solutions that meet the ever-growing demand for innovation and computing power.

I am an Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. The Department is home to award-winning faculty with a wide variety of expertise in fundamental and interdisciplinary research, and over 100 graduate students from all over the world. Keeping the faculty and students ahead of their research is a constantly evolving challenge for my team and I.

Revolution Analytics just released a new version of its suite of R-based statistical analysis tools Revolution R Enterprise 4.3. Significant new features include the ability to import data files from SPSS, a new predictive analytics algorithm for big data and an installer for Windows. Revolution R already supported importing from SAS files.

The new version is still free for academics, or for those participating in Kaggle data science competitions.

IBM Netezza and Revolution Analytics announced today at the Predictive Analytics World event that the two companies are working together to integrate the statistical programming language R into Netezza's Netezza TwinFin data warehouse appliance. The companies want to make it possible use R to process data on the data warehouse  appliance without moving to another system. This should enable much faster data processing.

Although no release data has been set, representatives from the companies say work on the project has begun in earnest. Select customers will beta test the integration in the coming months.

Revolution Analytics is a company that provides commercial support for the open source statistical programming language R. Its flagship product is Revolution R for Enterprise, a distribution of R that competes with other commercial statistical products such as SAS and SPSS. Revolution CEO Norman H. Nie was the co-inventor of SPSS.