With R continuing to gain attention, IBM has become a Platinum member of the R Consortium, the open source foundation that aims to support the R user community.

R is growing in popularity among statisticians, analysts and scientists wanting an open source language for data analysis. The R Consortium, which is backed by the Linux Foundation, hopes to ensure that the language evolves to meet new data challenges as they arise.

IBM has used R, among other data languages, to help create solutions including IBM Watson, its natural language/machine learning platform.

IBM is making a "significant investment" in the R Consortium. Donations of at least $100,000 are required for a company to become a Platinum sponsor. As a member of the R Consortium, IBM will collaborate with the R user community and support the project. As a Platinum member of R Consortium, IBM will get a seat on the board of directors, along with a seat on the Infrastructure Steering Committee. Dinesh Nirmal, vice president of development for next generation analytics platform and big data solutions at IBM will join the R Consortium Board of Directors. The other platinum members are Microsoft and RStudio. IBM is also a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation. Other well known backers of the R Consortium include  Google, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. 

The Consortium has awarded a number of grants to projects seen as being of interest to the R community. Its first grant was given in November 2015 to the R-Hub project. This is a service for developing, building, testing and validating R packages. Earlier this year the consortium announced funding for seven further projects developing tools and resources for the R user community, bringing total grant funding to $200,000. The grant recipients included a unified framework for distributed computing; an improved database interface; and a project to make it easier to include non-English translations of R packages. A grant was also awarded for a tool using the “Simple Features” standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Organization for Standardization. The tool will simplify analysis on modern geospatial data.

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