A core philosophy at Aventine is that marketing analytics initiatives can be done pragmatically without breaking the bank.
One of the developments that made it sensible for us to detach from larger consulting firms is the open source movement. As the open source options mature and become more robust in areas like databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) business intelligence (Pentaho, JasperSoft), and even customer relationship management (SugarCRM), starting a client down the path to being analytically savvy no longer needs to be tied to big, expensive technology deployments. Companies don't need to wait until they have a few million dollars in the budget to start down the analytics path.
We've been experimenting with R for about six months and find it to be a good alternative, but with a bit of a learning curve, especially having used some of the commercial alternatives for so many years. That said, we plan to explore its flexibility and ability to develop add-on packages to perform make possible some data visualization approaches that are difficult with SAS and the alternatives. We will share what we discover.
But the core of what we do is statistical analysis, and this field for years has been dominated by SAS, a powerful, but expensive, statistics application. Having SAS as part of an analytics capabilities solution has never been entirely consistent with our low-cost, pragmatic approach.
Fortunately, an open source alternative called "R" is out there and is beginning to take hold. As a sign of it's coming of age, the New York Times profiled this statistical analysis package in a recent article.
Meanwhile, for companies that have not yet committed to a solution, R is well worth investigating.
Here at Aventine, we are remaining non-committal for now. In addition to SAS and R, we use SPSS, a long-standing commercial alternative that has functionality very competitive with SAS and a much more attractive licensing model (i.e., perpetual vs. annual for SAS). I've also recently discovered a powerful Excel Add-In called XLSTAT that might be a good cost-effective and low learning-curve solution for some companies. The downside for us at Aventine is that we are a Mac shop, and the XLSTAT add-in doesn't work for the most recent version of Excel for Mac.
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