Insightful Upgrades Advanced Analytics PackageInsightful Upgrades Advanced Analytics Package

Insightful, a maker of advanced statistical software, this week announced an upgrade to its chief software platform for analyzing large bodies of numeric and text data.

S-Plus 7 is designed to support analysis of very big data sets and enable the development of applications for statistics and data mining. The upgrade marks the first major release of S-Plus in the last four years.

Improvements include an integrated environment for the development of analytic applications, and a "pipeline architecture" that streams large data sets instead of reading whole groups of data into memory simultaneously. Visualization and reporting capabilities have been boosted as well.

"This release enhances the capabilities of S-Plus to include wide deployment in production environments analyzing gigabytes of data that are deployed to hundreds of users across the enterprise," the company said in a statement.

Insightful applications are designed to perform tasks that are complex by the standards of most companies' business intelligence efforts. For example, a drug company might examine big chemical compound databases with the product, or a bank could use it to model trends among complex mortgage-backed securities products.

A small vendor that bills itself as a competitor with giants such as SAS, Insightful earned $2.1 million on revenue of $18.9 million in its 2004 fiscal year.