is r ready for the enterprise
TRANSCRIPT
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Agenda
• Data Science
• Why was there a need for R
• Classic Advantages of R
• Today’s advantages – Is R now ready for
the Enterprise
• Summary
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Data Science
• Analytics has long been a “reactive” industry
• Businesses increasingly understand that the key
to better decision making can be found in their
data
• The “Data Science” approach embodies a move
towards analytics used in a proactive manner to
drive decision-making
Matt Aldridge – CEO
The Data Science Opportunity
• Drive efficiencies and cost savings by putting
data-driven insight into the hands of decision
makers
• Analytics can help to
• Understand business drivers
• Predict trends
• Optimize business behaviours
• Identify new opportunities
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Key Data Science Component - R
• Massive growth in usage and popularity
• Grown from academic offshoot of S Language
• Fastest Growing Programming Language
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Why was there a need for R?
• Existing technologies grown around commercial operations
• Minimal innovation around stats and math • New techniques and methods taking years to reach
softwares
• Embedded stats within large scale softwares
• Stats as an add on rather than central
• Competitive advantage becoming crucial
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantages of R
• Open
• Extensible
• Powerful
• Support
• Graphics
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantage - Open Source
• Free! No license obligations
• Backbone of the S language developed by AT&T Bell Labs
• Core group supported by 1,000s of developers
• Large take up in academia
• New methods from research quickly integrated
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantage - Extensible
• Fast Growing Community
• Platform independent
• Architected as a central platform with addons
• Verticalised approach to industries
• If the algorithm doesn’t currently exist you can create it
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantage - Powerful
• License means R can be used in whatever manner you
want
• Can be used as an analysis slave with other apps
• Native connectivity to many other systems, Excel, SAS,
Oracle.
• Enhance existing apps with stats
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantage - Support
• Little formal support
• 1,000s of Developers
• Very fast growing community 0-250 messages a day on r-
help in <10 years
• Bugs very quickly solved
• Commercial support available from Mango
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantage - Graphics
• Easy to create sometime complex statistical charts
• Production ready graphics
• Control over all aspects of graph
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Classic Advantages of R Are Still Relevant
• Open
• Extensible
• Powerful
• Support
• Graphics
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Some advantages are more advantageous
than others…..
• Cost is still attractive but free software costs
money when deployed at scale
• Powerful was always a relative term
• User had ability to extend R and deploy powerfully
• Graphics, there are a host of other graphical
softwares that can be used today
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Reasons Why R is Ready for Enterprise
Deployment
• Architecture
• Stability and Maturity
• Ecosystem
• Market Presence
• New hires
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Reasons Why R is Ready
• Architecture
• R was developed for years for single use installations
• Developers not interested in IT installation
• Application is mature and in a steady state
• Latest releases (after 3.0.0) focus on providing a more
robust and stable environment
• Parallelisation – speeds up base R considerably
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Reasons Why R is Ready
• Stability and Maturity
• Class A packages promoted
• Methodology of package creation and deployment
• Mature test environments
• Solid Platform for extensions
• Availability through APIs
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Reasons Why R is Ready
• Ecosystem
• Methods to control spread and use
• Widely documented
• Companies offering plug ins – Shiny
• R is the glue for many new technologies
• Maturity of IDEs for R
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Reasons Why R is Ready
• Market Presence
• R is fastest growing analytics platform
• Large scale adoption across industries and across
functional areas, ie risk, trading, marketing functions in
Finance companies
• Many softwares using R as a third party stats tool e,g.
Microsoft, Qlik, Tableau, Oracle, Teradata
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Reasons Why R is Ready
• Next Generation Data Scientists
• Most universities are offering R as the sole technology
for maths based degrees and research
• Large population already coming into the workforce
having only used R
• Will get easier and easier to find skillset fit
Matt Aldridge – CEO
Summary
• R has typical open source history but:- • Is now a stable IT platform
• Take up means that it is being used increasingly in enterprise production environments
• Increasingly safe and future proofed choice for analytics
• Embedded into key standard IT technologies, Hadoop stack, SQL Server 2016
• R is not only ready for the enterprise but is already being deployed in widescale environments across the biggest companies in the world