Business Intelligence?

I guess I now have a new buzzword for what I’ve been thinking about for the past 8 months.  Looks like its a decent place to be right now too, from a business perspective…

In the last two years, the major software companies have scooped up companies in the business intelligence market. Among the larger moves, SAP bought Business Objects for $6.8 billion, I.B.M. bought Cognos for $4.9 billion and Oracle picked up Hyperion for $3.3 billion.

This is from a New York Times article talking about the company culture at SAS.

A personal note about SAS – in the article, they claim that SAS is under attack from open-source software like R, and that they didn’t recognize it in time. I guess I was one of the assailants. I remember when I was working at a startup, we had a need for automating analysis and developing graphics (we were dealing with patient biometric data). SAS wanted to sell us a package for like $3,000 – we didn’t even have that kind of money for salary!  From my perspective, R was just as good, if not better, and we made it work automatically using stat-connector (which at that time was under heavy development, it’s probably a lot better now than it was back then in 2004).

The major gripe I have with R is that there is no really good development environment. I’ve used Tinn-R, but the version I’ve been using lately hasn’t been that great. In terms of usability and support, Matlab still is the best option – but you definitely pay for it.  Fortunately, I’ve had a free license at MIT – I think if I go to a company that doesn’t have a Matlab license I’ll probably go through withdrawal, but I would definitely take R as my next choice.

I wonder if anybody has been able to implement R on a grid environment?