[R] SAS language to R :interview

[Ajay ohri]

Dear List,

Please find a frank interview with Phil Rack, creator of Bridge to R (
from both SAS and WPS interfaces).

 For those unaware of WPS- it is basically a SAS language compiler
(read SAS code,writes SAS code,Reads and writes SAS datasets) ,priced
at 660 $ a licence ( or estimated 10 times cheaper than Base SAS.

The UK based WPC held, WPS doesnt have advanced statistical facilities
like SAS /STAT , but that is solved with the Bridge to R

. http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/home/

Please find extract of interview-

Ajay- How does MineQuest intend to influence the analytical software paradigm?
Phil- I think the role for MineQuest in the next few years is twofold.
We'll keep offering services to banks and other financial service
firms in the area of Operational Risk and SAS programming.

The other area is to help these large financial service companies
realize that they can save millions of dollars by moving their SAS
Server licenses to WPS. This also allows the smaller businesses who
have steered away from SAS software because of cost to begin using WPS
and not take such a big financial hit. I find it exciting to think how
this will also open the job market for the thousands of SAS
programmers out there already.

The BI battles are taking place on the desktop and Windows Servers and
MineQuest has invested a lot of time and effort in creating macro
libraries to help these organizations migrate their code to WPS and
access R for advanced statistical capabilities.

We believe that the bread and butter software for almost any financial
organization in the BI realm ultimately revolves around the SAS
language for reporting, summarization and disbursement of data and we
plan to continue to serve that market.

Read More......( and use comments section to comment)

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/02/interview-phil-rack/