open source – Page 20 – DECISION STATS

Interview with Anne Milley, SAS II

Anne Milley is director of product marketing, SAS Institute . In part 2 of the interview Anne talks of immigration in technology areas, open source networks ,how she misses coding and software as a service especially SAS Institute�s offering . She also reveals some preview on SAS �s involvement with R and mentions cloud computing.

Ajay – Labor arbitrage outsourcing versus virtual teams located globally. What is the SAS Inst position and your opinion on this. What do you feel about the recent debate on HB1 visas and job cuts. How many jobs if at all is SAS planning to cut in 2009-2010.

Anne – SAS is a global company, with customers in more than 100 countries around the world. We hire employees in these countries to help us better serve our global customers. Our workforce decisions are based on our business needs. We also employ virtual teams–the feedback and insights from our global workforce help us improve and develop new products to meet the evolving needs of our customers. (As someone who works from her home office in Connecticut, I am a fan of virtual teaming!) We see these approaches as complementary.

The issue of the H-1B visa is a different discussion entirely. H-1B visas, although capped, permit US employers to bring foreign employees in �specialty occupations� into this country. The better question, though, is what is necessitating the need for H-1B visas. We would submit that the reason the U.S. has to look outside its borders for highly qualified technical workers is because we are not producing a sufficient number of workers with the right skill sets to meet U.S. demand. In turn, that means that our educational system is not producing students interested or qualified to pursue the STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) professions (either at a K-12 or post-secondary level), or developing the workforce improvement programs that may allow workers to pursue these �specialty occupations.� Further, any discussion about H-1B visas (or any other type of visa) should include a more comprehensive review of our nation�s immigration policies�are they working, are they not working, how or why are they, are we able to limit illegal immigration and if not, why not, etc.

I am not aware of any planned job cuts at SAS. In fact, I am aware of a few groups which are actively hiring.

Ajay- What open source softwares have SAS Institute worked in the past and it continues to support financially as well as technologically. Any exciting product releases in 2009-2010 that you can tell us about.

Anne- Open source software provides many options and benefits. We see many (SAS included) embracing open source for different things. Our software runs on Linux and we use some open-source tools in development. There are different aspects of open source software in developing SAS software:

-Development with open source tools such as Eclipse, Ant, NAnt, JUnit, etc. to build, test, and package our software

-Using open source software in our products; examples include Apache/Jakarta products such as the Apache Web Server.

-Developing open source software, making changes to an open source codebase, and optionally contributing that source back to the open source project, to adapt an open source project for use in a SAS product or for internal use. Example: Eclipse.

And we plan to do more with open source in the future. The first step of SAS integrating with R will be shown at SAS Global Forum coming up in DC later this month. Other announcements for new offerings are also planned at this event.

Ajay- What do you feel about adopting Software as a service for any of SAS Institute’s products. Any new initiatives from SAS on the cloud computing front especially in terms of helping customers cut down on hardware costs.

Anne- SAS Solutions OnDemand, the division which oversees the infrastructure and support of all our hosted offerings, is expanding in this rapidly growing market. SAS Solutions OnDemand Drug Development was our first SaaS offering announced in January. Additional news on new hosted offerings will be announced at SAS Global Forum later this month. SAS doesn�t currently offer any external cloud computing options, but we�re actively looking at this area.

Ajay– Which software do you personally find best to write code into and why. Do you miss writing code, if so why ?

Anne- In my current role, I have limited opportunity to write code. At times, I do miss the logical thought process coding forces you to adopt (to do the job as elegantly as possible). I had the opportunity to do a long-term assignment at a major financial services company in the UK last year and did get to use some SAS and JMP, including a little JSL (JMP scripting language). There�s nothing like real-world, noisy, messy data to make you thankful for the power of writing code! Even though I don�t write code on a regular basis, I am happy to see continued investment in the languages SAS provides�among the most recent, the addition of an algebraic optimization modeling language in our SAS/OR module contained within the SAS language as �PROC OPTMODEL.�

I have great respect for people who invest in learning (or even getting exposure to) more than one language and who appreciate the strengths of different languages for certain tasks and applications.

Ajay- It is great to see passionate people at work on both sides of the open source as well as packaged software teams- and even better for them to collaborate once in a while.Most of our work is based on scientists who came before us (especially in math theory).

Ultimately we are all just students of science anyway.

SAS Global Forum –http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/2009/

Annual event of SAS language practitioners.SAS language consists of data step and proc steps for input and output thus simplifying syntax for users.

SAS Institute � The leader of analytics software since 1970�s , it grew out of the North Carolina University, and provides jobs to thousands of people. The world�s largest privately held company, admired for it�s huge investments in Research and Development and criticized for its premium price on packaged software solutions.A recent entrant in corporate users who are willing to support R language.

Interview:Richard Schultz , CEO REvolution Computing

Here is an interview with the CEO of REvolution Computing, Richard Schultz. Mr. Schultz offers his perspectives on aspects of the open source, predictive analytics, cloud computing as well his vision for R Commercial.

Note from Ajay-As I blogged previously, commercial establishments now have an option to use R commercially with a full service contract and all guarantees which they expect and get from existing analytics software vendors.

Ajay -Linux has not really succeeded in capturing Windows /Desktop Operating market. What are the technical and business reasons that you think R will succeed in analytics desktop software market.

Richard- To start, Linux was never really targeted at the Windows desktop market, but rather at deseating proprietary Unix deployments (particularly in finance), which it did quite successfully. This is a similar trend to what we’re seeing in the R world – it’s not that R is generally replacing Excel, for instance. In addition, with the large and growing base of both users and contributors, the vibrancy of the R community has taken on a life of its own.

As to R and Windows, two things are worth noting:

1. Microsoft has moved rapidly to embrace R and REvolution for that matter.

2. Windows is still the predominate operating system in large commercial enterprises. Because we deploy R on multiprocessors, which are now common on all computers including those pre-loaded with Windows, REvolution R is very much at home in both Windows, Mac, and Linux environments.

Ajay- What are the biggest challenges to Revolution Computing while explaining R Pro to users of traditional statistics softwares. What are the biggest advantages?

Richard- The biggest challenge is getting the word out that there now exists validated and supported R products designed for commercial use. But that’s changing rapidly, as your own interest in REvolution Computing demonstrates. Our biggest advantages are several:

1. we are focused on building a close and collegial relationship with the open source R community;

2. our company has a deep history in super computing and parallelization;

3. with, by Intel’s estimate, over 1 million R users and growing, there is a large community eager to adapt our products as its members advance their careers in the business and research worlds.

Ajay- Which softwares do you think will be affected the most by R’s spread across colleges and companies. What do you believe will be their strategies to compete.

Richard – I want to be politic here. Let me say that the programming software likely most affected by the rise of R is probably proprietary.

We see many opportunities to partner and leverage the strengths of REvolution’s products specifically – high performance, handling of large data, validation, IDE / user interface.

Ajay- How do you intend to incorporate the cloud computing and Software as a Service Model for R Pro. When , if at all, do you think it be possible for a person to simply upload a zipped csv file, work on a remote cloud computer for analytics and forecasting, and just pay for the hired software,hardware,bandwidth.

Richard – We were thinking of something based on the Ohri framework. ;-). ( Ajay- Touché!)

In fact, we have deployed, and are deploying cloud-based REvolution R for clients, and it’s something we expect to evolve as those technologies evolve.

Ajay- Asian countries have huge demand for analytics, and are more price conscious on softwares. What would your strategy to sell in Asia /China and India be.

Richard – Open source can be a tremendous win for users in Asia / China / India. The upfront costs are low, the technology is leading-edge, and there is a distribution network for support. REvolution has partners, and is continuing to build its partner network to be able to reach these markets. We expect to accelerate our efforts in these regions toward the end of 2009.

Ajay- What has been the story so far for your career. What prompted you to join/start Revolution Computing. What would be the advice you would give to young science graduates in today’s recession.

Richard – My own background is in computer science, business… and music. Through school I held various positions at IBM, and after graduate school, I worked at Dunn & Bradsteet in a product management role and developed a taste for entrepreneurship. I’ve started two companies so far, MetaServer, a business intelligence middleware company that catered to the insurance industry, and REvolution Computing. Today, MetaServer is part of Oracle. And I continue to play music – guitar and piano. One of these days we’ll get a REvolution Computing band together.

My advice to young science graduates is the same recession or no: follow your enthusiasms; find a passion outside of work like playing music; master open source program languages because that is the future and the future is here.

About Richard Schultz –Chief Executive Officer,REvolution Computing

Richard guides REvolution’s long-range business strategy and leads the company’s teams on a daily basis. His experience developing and growing Business Intelligence software companies includes founding and leading Metaserver, Inc., now a part of Oracle, from inception to sale. Richard has been named Innovator of the Year by Business New Haven; served on the board of the Connecticut Venture Group; and been the keynote speaker for CIO Forum and other technology industry events. A graduate of Washington University with degrees in Computer Science, Business and Music, Richard also holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stonybrook and has held senior positions at Dunn and Bradstreet and IBM.

Ajay -REvolution Computing has been a leader in this field and going by the latest product launch –well you can try it yourself and see from here http://www.revolution-computing.com

Modified Ohri Framework

Some time back, I had created a framework for data mining through on demand cloud computing. This is the next version- it is free to use for all, with only authorship credit back to me…………..

It tries to do away with fixed server ,desktop costs AND fixed software costs in softwares which are used for data mining ,stats and analytics and have huge huge per CPU count annual license fees

The modified Ohri Framework tries to mash the following

0) HTTPS rather than HTTP

1) Encryption and Compression Software for data transfer (like PGP)

2) Open source stats package like R in cloud computer (like Amazon EC2 or Rightscale with hadoop)

3) GUI to make it easy to use (like Rattle GUI and PMML Package)

4) A Data Mining Open Source Package (like Rapid Miner or Splunk)

5) RIA Graphics (like Silverlight )

6) Secure Output to cloud computing devices (like Google Docs)

7) Billing or Priced at simple cost plus X % (where simple cost can be like 0.85 cent /per instance hour or more depending on usage and X should not be more than 15 %)

8) Open source sharing of all code to ensure community sandboxing

Intention is to remove fixed computing costs of servers and desktops to normal PC’s (Ubuntu Linux ) with (Firefox or IE Explorer ) access to secure data mining on demand .

On tap demand mining to anyone in the world without going for the big license purchases/renewals (software expenses) or big hardware purchases (which become obsolete in 2-3 years).