Briefs

Philip Howard, 11th August 2008, Bloor Research

For a long time SAS and SPSS have pretty much had the data mining market to themselves. True, there are other vendors in the market such as KXEN, InSightful and Angoss but SAS and SPSS have clearly been the big beasts in the market. However, that may be about to change with the introduction of RStat from Information Builders, which was announced earlier this summer and is scheduled to be generally available early in Q4.

RStat is an open source product that forms an optional add-on to the company's WebFOCUS business intelligence environment. It is named after the fact that it is based on R which, in case you don't know, is the open source statistical language. It is just a language and hitherto there has not been a user interface for it. Nevertheless, R is widely employed in universities and elsewhere (including both the US and Australian governments) with an estimated one million users worldwide. In other words, if you were going to build a data mining product R would be a good place to start.

Read more.