Revolution Analytics announces $999 site licenses for universities and public service organizations

by Joseph Rickert

Revolution Analytics is announcing three new programs today that we hope will be modest but positive contributions to data science education and public service analytics. The first new program, the Academic Institution Program (AIP) enables colleges, universities and other educational institutions to obtain a site license for Revolution Analytics' commercial distribution of the R Language, Revolution R Enterprise (RRE), for the yearly fee of $999. This is not a watered-down version of the software. It is a full-featured, supported distribution of RRE including the Big Data capability of Revolution R Enterprise ScaleR and the secure, scalable web services distribution software: Revolution R Enterprise DeployR. For this one nominal fee, a participating academic institution can run the software on workstations and PCs in software labs, on all of its departmental and central IT servers, on large clusters (including Hadoop clusters), and on cloud resources under its control. The only limitation is that, wherever it is installed, that the software be used only for academic purposes.

Revolution Analytics has always made a single user workstation version of RRE available as a totally free download for students and faculty, and we are very proud that quite a few academics have used our software for learning and research. We will continued to offer free single user workstation academic downloads under the renamed Individual Scholar Program (ISP). However, only so much can be accomplished with individual downloads. Even when the entire class downloads the software it use depends on the expertise of the students and every new class must begin from scratch. Having R as part of the IT infrastructure, however, will allow departments within the university to realize multiple benefits in productivity, collaboration and performance. Our intention with the AIP is to help colleges and universities deploy R as their global platform for quantitative learning.  Details of the AIP and ISP programs may be found on our website.

Our third new program, what we are calling the Public Services Program (PSP), is designed to make RRE available to non-profit organizations working for the public good. Our model organization for this program is the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). I have blogged about this group before and we at Revolution Analytics continue to be impressed by their determination to use statistical models as a light to illuminate those areas where the world needs to pay attention. (Clearly, not all of brightest minds of this generation of data scientists are engaged in getting people to click ads.) We hope that by offering site licenses for RRE to public services organizations for the same nominal fee as offered to academic institutions we will encourage and enable more public service non-profits organizations to bring the tools of data science to bear on important problems in health care, economics, conversation and other areas that will benefit society as a whole. The details of the PSP along with guidelines as to what kinds of organizations qualify for this program may be found on same link mentioned above.

Please send your nominations for non-profit that could benefit from the Public Services Program to community@revolutionanalytics.com.

Revolution Analytics: Academic and Public Service Programs