R Goes Mainstream

When the Vhayu product team determined that we should integrate the R language into the quantitative research version of our Vhayu Velocity tick database, we made the bet that it will become the standard on Wall Street. We launched Velocity for Quantitative Research at TradeTech in April 2008, and briefed our press and analyst contacts on our strategy and the benefits that customers would realize. Coverage resulted in financial trades, deals began to close, and clients could easily access the continually increasing volumes of real-time and historical market data requiring analysis.

Meanwhile, the following for the open source language has been growing amongst statisticians, engineers and scientists and adoption increasing in a wide variety of industries and academia. To the point that technology reporter Ashlee Vance of The New York Times wrote an article, "Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power" on the subject last week. Seeing R receive mainstream attention (the article featured in the "Top 10" on the NYTimes.com most emailed list) was exciting given the call that we made on it. Estimates of the size of the R population now range between 250,000 and 2 million people, and users across fields are minimizing their investment in costly statistical software licenses and proprietary languages and capitalizing on the talent emerging from universities.

Vance's story apparently generated a flood of reader responses, and his follow-up blog post, "R You Ready for R?" linked our product manager's blog post about its rise. For a client perspective on using R, you can view a webinar that we produced with equity arbitrage trader Alex Perel of TD Newcrest. And as we continue to evolve Velocity for Quantitative Research, we hope to hear from you with feedback on R or other tools for quantitative analysis.