As Asian Interest in Big Data Grows, Revolution Analytics Opens Office in Singapore

Revolution Analytics, a commercial software and services provider for statistical computing (specifically the open source R programming language), recently announced the opening of an office in Singapore. The outpost will serve as the Palo Alto company’s Asia Pacific headquarters and development center as it continues to grow its business in the Asia region.

The company has also partnered with Singapore Polytechnic’s Center for SME Infocomm Resource (CSIR) to help train its students and lecturers in advanced analytics using R. Global interest in big data has been booming around the world, and R is one of the more prominent analytical tools that is riding that wave. I had a chance to speak to the company’s CEO, Dave Rich, as well as VP of marketing David Smith, who both elaborated further on the move to set shop there, and what it means for the company as well as for Singapore and the region.

When I asked about the progress of data science in Asia as compared to elsewhere, David noted that it is not quite as mature as it is in the US. But he quickly pointed out Asian companies are still very enthusiastic about how they might capitalize on big data analytics, which means a lot of interest in R and Revolution Analytics’s technologies:

I think many of the big organizations over in Asia are really looking to big data and data analytics as strategic initiatives in a way that the US never did. A great example is IDA in Singapore, really putting a lot of muscle, intellectual capacity, and money behind developing big data technologies in Singapore and the Asia region, and I’ve seen this in Korea and I think in Japan as well, so I think it’ll catch a very quickly because of government involvement in promoting these technologies.

A differentiator for Singapore

CEO Dave Rich noted that Singapore has a big opportunity to carve out a niche as the go-to place for advanced analytics and consumer data analytics, adding that building such an image for the country is a great way to attract more headquarters of multinational companies who are big users of analytics. While countries like India and China have settled into their own IT niches, this could be a new way for Singapore to further distinguish itself.

Dave further explained that in addition to Singapore, the company has seen interest in other parts of the Asia region, including some of the region’s mega markets:

We have active engagement in Korea and Japan. NTT Docomo was one of our first big customer in Japan, one of our backers is Presidio Ventures, the investment arm of Sumitomo Bank – so Japan has been eyeing us for a while now, and through Presidio/Sumitomo they have been our conduit into Japan. And there’s much interest in Korea, and through partners like Accenture and IBM we’re finding ourselves being brought into China as well. Given Accenture’s big involvement in India, means we will probably have to open up some capability there as well.

I asked Dave about whether or not governments in the region were actually looking at data analytics technologies as solutions that they can bring to their own operations. He explained that indeed many of them are seeing the potential of applications on the R platform in solving problems faced by urban governments.

He notes that in Asia, people appear more keen to make a link between data science and decision science, since many of the companies here have been historically data-driven ones: