Between the recent launch of Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 and the announcement of the SAS to R Challenge, there's been a flurry of recent news about Revolution Analytics and R in the media. Here's a quick recap:

The Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan comments on the SAS to R Challenge: 'Red Hat for stats' goes toe-to-toe with SAS. “By supporting the SAS file format natively, customers can continue to keep their data in the same format as they are accustomed to, but can add new users to do new analytics work using the R Enterprise tool, bypassing the need to buy more SAS licenses.”

CIO Magazine named Revolution Analytics one of 20 companies to watch in 2011. “The rise of the open source languages such as R and the commercial open source offerings based on them, are providing a lower cost alternative to proprietary offerings; effectively allowing companies to do predictive analytics on a lower budget.”

The Forbes column At Your Servers by Quentin Hardy commented on the SAS to R Challenge in the article, Another Open Source Swipe at IBM and SAS. “Revolution Analytics, competing with analytic software giants SAS Institute and IBM with a corporate version of the open source R software, has issued a cocky challenge.”

The New York Times technology section published an article on Revolution's CEO, The Data Whisperer: Norman Nie of Revolution Analytics. The interview by Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM on which the article is based is available in video form, Big Thoughts on Big Data.

The DM Radio podcast How Modeling Helps Performance, Across the Board included David Smith (yours truly) as a guest in the third segment, where I talked about statistical modeling of big data and the need for data science skills to address the problem of deriving insight from massive data sets.

Revolution Analytics: News Room