Revolution Analytics launches European business

With more than two million global users and an established presence in academic research dating back to the 1990s, the open source R programming language is emerging as the de facto standard for computational statistics and predictive analytics. Many UK and continental European universities use R as the statistical tool of choice for undergraduate and post graduate studies. This has created an established talent pool of R users that have come into businesses over the last five years in industries such as finance, life sciences, retail, manufacturing, utilities, and media.
Established in 2007, Revolution Analytics already has over 200 customers globally, and an extensive technology partner ecosystem which includes, IBM, Teradata, Hortonworks, and Cloudera. The company provides Revolution R Enterprise workstation and server software for organisations that need a high performance, Big Data, analytics platform at a fraction of the cost of legacy analytics vendors. Revolution R Enterprise allows R to scale to any data size, delivers high speed and high volume analytics, high speed database connectors and in-database capabilities, integration with front end business user tools, and a commercial support model. The company also supports the open source R community and provides a free, production-grade version for academic users.

Neil Miller sees the R phenomenon being rapidly adopted by European businesses in ever increasing numbers, “Our website is used as a global source of information for R and we are seeing significant demand from Europe. The UK, Germany, and France are driving this trend. We believe European companies are ideally positioned to reap the benefits of the highly educated talent pool of data scientists coming out of our top universities. With global brands like Google, Twitter, Facebook and CapitalOne using R to drive business innovation and data scientist productivity, R is becoming the language of choice for the next generation of statisticians. Our mission is to work with businesses to help them understand the power of Revolution R Enterprise and exploit the business advantages it brings in scalability, analytic innovation, performance, and lower cost. We are already seeing huge interest in Revolution Analytics in Europe with over 100 customers engaged with us at various stages of the buying cycle over the last few months.”

The opening of the Revolution Analytics EMEA office in London has been welcomed by London Tech City. Benjamin Southworth, Deputy CEO, commented: “London is now the digital capital of Europe due to its heritage of creativity and innovation, and its easy access to the financial centre of the city which makes it an excellent strategic location for large companies to base themselves. We welcome the news that Revolution Analytics has chosen to base its European headquarters here and the expertise they’ll bring to the Tech City community.”

Rafael Garcia-Navarro, Managing Partner – Head of Analytics EMEA at Neo@Ogilvy said: “Revolution Analytics has built an excellent and scalable enterprise-ready platform on the foundations of one of the most powerful and widely adopted statistical environments in the data science field, open source R. Revolution R Enterprise is the perfect complement to Neo@Ogilvy’s Big Data Hadoop architecture which has allowed us to evolve our strategic planning approach into a truly scientific process. It overcomes the traditional in-memory limitations of open source R to deliver terrific performance.”

Robert Gentleman, one of the co-authors of the original R programming language and a member of the Revolution Analytics board of directors, said, “We wrote R to support our research and to provide students with tools for writing programmes to visualise and analyse data. It was adopted by the open source community and, largely due to the efforts of the R Core Team, has scaled exponentially over the past ten years to a vast range of functions and capabilities. It is wonderful to see how it has taken off and has been enhanced by the community. Business needs are changing with ever larger data sets to analyse and a requirement for faster modelling times that can support real time decision making and greater analytic experimentation. Revolution Analytics helps organisations achieve this by taking R up to an enterprise and production level of software and support.”

EMEA Leadership Team
Neil Miller, Managing Director, International – Neil Miller is responsible for Revolution Analytics' business and growth outside the Americas and is based in the U.K. Neil Miller joined the company after 14 years at Accenture where he led Analytics, CRM Customer Insight and Marketing Transformation practices in the U.K, Ireland, and Europe. His consulting experience is complemented by 13 years operational experience with Lloyds Bank and GE Capital in a variety of sales, account management, organisation development, and six-sigma business improvement roles in the U.K. and the U.S.

Nick Barber, EMEA Sales Director – Nick Barber is responsible for defining and building a successful multi-million dollar sales channel for Revolution Analytics in Europe. Previously, Nick Barber worked at the SAS Institute building a new alliances channel up from zero with partners such as Cap Gemini, Deloitte, and Accenture. He then took a global leadership role at SAS to drive sales through Accenture in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Nick Barber was also a founding member of Cascade Systems that later became Engage. During his 14-year tenure there, he assumed EMEA-wide responsibility for management of enterprise sales.

Andrie de Vries, Business Services Director – Andrie de Vries is responsible for delivering consulting and training services in the use of R. He is a leading R expert within the R user community, and co-authored R for Dummies, an introductory text on the statistical language R. Andrie de Vries has over 20 years’ experience delivering smart, data-driven analytics and strategic insights for clients, most recently at his own consultancy, PentaLibra, and previously at Nokia, Symbian, Psion, Bain, and Andersen Consulting.

Simon Field, Technical Services Director – Simon Field is responsible for technical and architecture consulting and pre-sales support. Prior to joining Revolution Analytics, Simon Field was the Chief Technology Officer for IBM’s Big Data portfolio in EMEA with responsibility for both the technical pre-sales and post sales account management organisation. Simon Field has worked in the IT industry for 21 years and held positions with BT, W.H. Smith, Teradata, IBM, HP, and Netezza.