Omniscope and R

... The new demo release of Omniscope from UK vendor Visokio especially caught my eye. An email I received from the product manager mentioned new R integration and provided links to several recorded demos explaining how it works. Though excited, I made a mental concession that I'd be happy if the capability simply allowed me to access native R data in Omniscope - essentially, an ODBC or JDBC for R. At the same time, after having evaluated what appears to be similar interoperability between Spotfire and R a year and a half ago, I was interested in how the Omniscope/R connectivity compared. I'm glad I invested the time to find out.

Omniscope is somewhat distinctive among its peers. The software has two major product components: DataExplorer, which provides data discovery & analysis, reporting and dashboarding, and DataManager, which offers tools to build and manage data sets. DataManager is essentially a poor man's ETL tool, providing a drag and drop visual workflow to drive data extraction, merge, transformation and delivery on a small scale. When I first started looking at Omniscope, I pooh-poohed DataManager, thinking I'd never need it. After all, what can't I do with Pentaho Data Integration and Ruby? I later started to appreciate DM quite a bit.

... Though there are a few gotchas like missing data surprises, based on my tests to date, count me as an enthusiastic supporter of the interoperability of R and Omniscope. The combination indeed makes for a powerful data science exploration platform. And for Agile BI at its finest.

Kudos to Visokio for a job well done. Me? I'm ecstatic. I can now have my interactive visualization cake and eat my R for statistical analysis, too!