A flurry of press releases from SAS®.

Two caught my eye: SAS to offer R integration to support analytical innovation, and SAS and Teradata Announce Availability of Analytic Advantage and Optimization Services Packages.

SAS to offer R integration to support analytical innovation

SAS, the leader in business analytics, is expanding analytical options for its customers with a new interface to R open-source statistical software. SAS’ initial integration with R will be included in SAS/IML ® Studio 3.2 (formerly SAS Stat Studio) scheduled for summer 2009.

…

“It is no secret that SAS has been working on interfacing with R,” said Anne Milley, SAS’ Senior Director of Technology Product Marketing. “SAS and R are here to stay, and as organizations work to harness the full potential of their data, an expanded set of analytics options can only help.”

So if you want the R interface you need to license software (SAS/IML) that under-performs the software (R) that you currently use. I think that this is a brave step by SAS, but it looks a little misguided: the power of R is that it interfaces with SAS data and provides functionality not available in SAS and all of this for little cost (cost as effort, rather than just license dollars).

If R was being used as a marketing tool to try to sell SAS, I could imagine an antipathy or backlash developing in the R community.

SAS and Teradata Announce Availability of Analytic Advantage and Optimization Services Packages

Why is it that when we’re paying for SAS and Teradata we feel that we can expect to pay for their integration, but when one component (eg R, see above) is free, we expect the package should be free?

“Our partnership with SAS creates a highly innovative dream team focused on helping companies activate and optimize analytic model development and execution inside the database, where we see processing speeds increase as much as 45 times,” said Rob Berman, SAS Partnership Vice President for Teradata. “These two packages are just the beginning of an in-database planned portfolio of offers we’ll deliver to a market that is ready and waiting for it. In view of the economic pressures companies now face, these packages have come at exactly the right time.”

…

The Teradata and SAS partnership has continued to earn high marks from the analyst community. “Both SAS and Teradata are large, financially stable companies with loyal customer bases,” said Helena Schwenk, Senior IT Analyst at Ovum, in a new analysis. “More importantly, both companies’ software, applications and infrastructure are essential tools for helping companies beat the downturn – whether they are used to highlight cost reduction opportunities, improve supply chains, optimize inventory levels, help businesses understand risk or rapidly changing customer preferences and spending.”

I look forward to hearing more!

Technorati Tags: analytics, integration, r, SAS, teradata

And then I read that R is the most popular statistical package at Google. Clearly not so bijou, after all.

So now the tricky question: if we are going to embark on an exploratory data-mining exercise, do we go down the SAS® route and license Enterprise Miner, or do we jump on the band wagon and try a proof of concept using R?

I hadn’t realised, for example, that R had packages that allow one to interface with SAS datasets – this means we can exploit data we are familiar with no need for data conversion…

… but, I’m the SAS admin? Part of this feels very wrong. Perhaps I should rebrand myself as an Analytics Support Manager? Not as snappy, I’ll grant you.

Addendum: After reading the interview with Anne Milley, I laughed out loud when I saw Ajay Ohri’s earlier post (R for SAS users,) just what I need!

Technorati Tags: analytics, r, SAS

After posting about charting a route through a rolling biblioscape yesterday, my mind turned to the route I’m treading at work. Is SAS® the high-point? I hope so, but the recent interest in R got me thinking.

R is a closed book to me, I’d never come across it before. Finding a new area of complete ignorance is always exciting. I decided to start investigating.

My first port of call was the R Project site. Here I was able to quickly download and install R on my desktop machine and find good introductory documentation which included a sample session that I could walk through.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was: the installation was trivial and the sample code worked easily. I was interested by how terse R syntax seems to be, and how quickly one could create output. And all this with anonymity: no registration, no download fees.

So the question is: is R on the plateau around Mount SAS, or is SAS merely base camp for the ascent of R?

I haven’t a clue yet, but I’ll let you know my thoughts as they occur.

Why the interest in R? It is part idle curiosity, and part a desire to hedge my bets. I wouldn’t have backed Linux against Windows, and yet look at the success it has enjoyed: around 14% of the server market. Having seen this rise from zero to hero, anything is possible. Especially in the current economic climate. If I was starting out, I’d be very tempted to take a punt on R – there appear to be immediate savings in both time and money when compared to a front-loaded license fee model. If students are using it then there is potentially a pool of able users that could be hired economically and who would grow with the software as it continues to mature.

One thing that would give me pause is the cost of ownership. The technical support may not be to the standard offered by SAS, but most of my SAS problems are actually solved by the SAS community on forums and listservs, and this is exactly where open source projects draw their strength from.

The other question, and one I haven’t an answer to, is whether R can help me with the business problems I use SAS to tackle. The worrying thing for SAS*, is that I may be able to answer it quite soon: now that I’ve got R installed on my desktop I can play around with it whilst I’m waiting for remotely submitted jobs to execute on our server. I can do this for free in spare time.

* I’m guessing – I’ve got no connection or insight to SAS other than as a customer/user.

Technorati Tags: analytics, future, r, SAS

Well, whilst they may help, I think Edward Tufte has identified some of the key issues in his paper on the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. I’m a great fan of Tufte and devoured his books on long commutes: the only time a fellow commuter has ever taken an interest in what I have been reading was after they had been admiring his rich pagination over my shoulder – I was too engrossed to notice.

Having bought the books through Amazon, their alogrithm suggested that, based on my spending patterns, I might enjoy certain other of their offerings. Two spring to mind as having been pushed relentlessly through “Amazon’s recommendations for you” pages: Information Dashboard Design and Presentation Zen. Neither was in the same league, nor did they aim to be. IDD was interesting, had some neat ideas and a cunning new graphical scheme for displaying a lot of information densely; coming from Tufte’s work, I found Presentation Zen attractive but very shallow. This disappointing performance has turned me off Amazon’s recommendations.

But is this fair?

I suppose I imagine reading as a journey, with each step taking me ever upwards. The problem is that if great books are distributed on a power law basis and you read one of the very best, then there is likely to be a lot of (relative) dross in the foothills, and I wonder whether this exposes a problem with Amazon’s analytics: whether they take into account the sequencing of purchases (a reading vector), or just correlations between purchases. (Of course, I’m assuming that my estimation of the relative merit of these books is absolute, which may be very far from the case!)

I took a route to Tufte via Jon Moon’s books; perhaps other people have travelled via Presentation Zen, and Amazon is simpy showing me the footsteps around Mount Tufte. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about how Amazon works: do they have someone interested in BI and Performance Improvement?

… talk of which, brings me neatly to Tammi Kay George: I was inspired to write this after reading her recent blog post in which she mentions Presentation Zen. I couldn’t help wondering if she had been bludgenoned into buying it by Amazon, too: I suspect there may be an overlap between her library shelves and mine, and if there is, my decision to buy Presentation Zen undoubtedly will have increased the likelihood of Amazon recommending it to her! It’s all my fault!

Technorati Tags: amazon, analytics, bi, powerpoint, presentation zen, recommendations, SAS, statistics, tufte