Briefs

SAS Warms to Open-Source One Letter at a Time

New York Times, By Ashlee Vance, Feb 16, 2009

The SAS Institute has borrowed a page from Sesame Street. It is now sponsoring the letter 'R'.

Last month, I wrote an article about the rising popularity of the R programming language. The open-source software has turned into a favorite piece of technology for statisticians and other people looking to pull insights out of data.

On several levels, R represents a threat to SAS, which is the largest seller of commercial statistics software. Students at universities now learn R alongside SAS. In addition, the open-source nature of R allows the software to be tweaked at a pace that is hard for a commercial software maker to match.

... In a recent customer support notice, SAS said it will support R in one of its software products, allowing data to flow between R and SAS programs.

"This is just the first step," Radhika Kulkarni, the vice president for advanced analytics at SAS, said in the notice. "We are busy working on an R interface that can be surfaced in the SAS server or via other SAS clients."

Read more.