Here are three recent news articles that feature interviews with members of the Revolution Analytics team talking about the importance of the R language:

• In Forbes, CEO Dave Rich talks to Gil Press about the business landscape for Big Data. In the article, Dave says:

  SAS and SPSS remind me of Cobol and Fortran circa 1995. The scientific and academic institutions are relying on R and over time, this will be like the switch from Cobol to Java. The kids today are learning R and it will have the run for the next forty years that SAS and SPSS had for the last forty.

• Sramana Mitra's Thought Leaders in Big Data series features an in-depth interview with Dave and Chief Strategy Officer Michele Chambers. Michele says:

  There is a new generation of tools, methodologies, and resources that are being trained at universities today. That is all being done around [the programming language] R.

• I also recently talked to InformationWeek about the Big Data Disconnect: how some organizations are stuggling to make sense of their data stores, and how the R language is a key part of the solution: 

R has two primary advantages, according to Smith. "It's designed to work with data and build models with data," he said. "[Programmers] can go from a concept to a working model in a fraction of the time it takes with legacy systems." The second advantage is R's open source design. "You've got an entire community of statisticians and data scientists [who] are really pushing the envelope on data access, data platforms like Hadoop, data analysis techniques and also data visualization, which is an increasingly important part of the story."