TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R: The Challenges of Making the R Language Enterprise-Ready

• Activity Number: 430
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Stephen Kaluzny*+ and Lou Bajuk
• Companies: TIBCO Software Inc. and TIBCO Software Inc.
• Keywords: R ; software ; intellectual property

Abstract

The R dialect of the S language, originally developed at Bell Labs, has become a vehicle for innovation and collaboration in the world of statistics. However, the R/S language, and the open source R engine, has faced some barriers to acceptance in the enterprise software world.

Drawing on our over 20 years of experience working with the S language, and our enterprise software expertise, we have developed the TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR) to overcome many of these barriers. The new engine enables our customers to develop in open source R, but then deploy their scripts using TERR, without having to change any of their R code. We will present the motivation and history of the development of this new engine, discuss the technical and intellectual property challenges we faced, and describe the value it brings to both large organizations and individual R users.