10 minutes – that is all it takes to provision an analytics environment using Revolution CloudR, an analytics Platform as a Service (PaaS) developed in Singapore with support from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). CloudR was developed to help companies perform scalable big data analytics in the cloud using the open source “R” statistical computing language and the Hadoop data-processing framework.

Speaking at the launch of CloudR on 29 August, Mr Laurence Liew, General Manager of Revolution Analytics Asia-Pacific, said, “Economics is driving big data analytics to the cloud. While many companies will still do big data on-premise within the organisation for various reasons, we believe that about half of all analytics jobs will eventually move to the cloud.”

CloudR is positioned to take advantage of this development. Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it enables businesses and software developers to provision analytics environments quickly and efficiently, and to do it across different regions.

As Mr Liew explained, building an analytics environment requires machines with a lot of memory, and businesses will have to provision high performance computing clusters for smaller data sets and Hadoop clusters for huge data sets. “Not many organisations have the skillsets to manage the different types of architecture,” he said.  And even if they did, Mr Liew estimated that it would take at least two weeks for them to set up the business analytics environment.

CloudR addresses this by automating the provisioning of big data infrastructures and allowing an analytics environment to be created within minutes through a user-friendly portal. It also provides businesses with access to data sets to build their analytical models, for example, the real-time social media feed or other public data sets available on AWS.

For next phase of the CloudR development, Revolution Analytics is looking to make it more extensible and allow businesses to make use of it as a platform for collaboration. “Small and medium enterprises may have data sets that need to be analysed but do not have a data scientist in-house to do that. The platform will allow them to upload their data sets and work with our partners, who will come in and help them to build models to help them in their business.”

Mr Liew also provided an update on Revolution Analytics’ collaboration with IDA on its Centre of Attachment (COA) and Centre of Excellence (COE) initiatives, which were announced earlier this year to help grow Singapore’s big data and analytics capabilities.

The COA programme is aimed at accelerating the formation of data science teams within organisations, and will kick off with an initial intake of five trainees before the end of this year. These could be fresh graduates, for example, mathematics and statistics graduates who will need training in IT infrastructure and big data; or IT graduates who will be taught statistics and “R” to help them work alongside the data scientists.

However, Mr Liew emphasised that the participants will not be just coming in for the training. “Companies coming to us must bring a problem statement,” he said. “At the end of the day, they need to demonstrate how analytics is applied to solve a real business problem within their organisation.”

Under the three-month programme, participants will spend one month on-site at Revolution Analytics’ centre at Changi Business Park. They will also have to work on their business problem, and this project will continue under supervision of their mentors when they return to their own workplace. “At the end of the programme, we want them to have something that the business can make use of.”

Revolution Analytics is also looking to strengthen local skillsets in big data and analytics and to develop new capabilities under its COE programme. Targeted mainly at independent software vendors, the COE aims to provide opportunities to create new intellectual property in big data analytics in Singapore.

“Big data is a key business imperative,” said Mr Liew, citing IDA projections that big data spending in the Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) will reach US$603 million in 2013. “We have received much interest from various companies since the Centre of Excellence was launched, and are looking forward to helping more local firms gain a foothold in the data analytics market,” he said.