Statistical Analysis | News

Academic Program Discounts Enterprise Release of R

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/06/14

Higher ed now has a new option for implementing computational statistics and predictive analytics in their courses and research programs. Revolution Analytics, which sells enterprise versions of open source programming language R, has launched a program specifically for colleges and universities that want to adopt the software. R is suited for use in statistical analysis and big data computation.

In the "Academic Institution Program," schools pay $999 annually for the company's latest edition of its Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) suite for an unlimited number of users as well as general support. The software can be run on workstations, servers and clusters either onsite or in a cloud environment.

The company already makes a free license available to individuals through an "Individual Scholar Program."

One institution that looks forward to participating in the program is Grand Valley State University. "We look forward to participation in the Academic Institution Program," said Professor David Zeitler. "It promises to provide a cost effective way to provide a true enterprise-level big data experience that our analytics and data science students need."

"By offering Revolution Analytics' robust predictive analytics software to universities and public service nonprofits, we hope to inspire the next generation of data scientists to tackle big problems with social and scientific significance," said Joseph Rickert, data scientist community manager at the company. "R is the most powerful and widely used statistical language and now academics and data scientists at public service nonprofits will have access to the same commercial version of RRE software used by large enterprises."

The company is offering a similar program to public service nonprofits.

Other institutional users have included the University of Buffalo in New York and the University of Utah.