While the big brothers in analytics like SAS and IBM-SPSS made huge inroads in the year, this was not a bad year for the smaller players as well.
On the web analytics front a viable open source alternative to Google Analytics emerged in the form of Piwik -that continued to gain significant traction even in its beta stage. The most exciting feature of Piwik is the customizability of its dashboards- which means that for a new business, you choose the web metrics that matter most to you and track those at a periodicity defined by you
In the rest of the statistical world, R continued to gain wider acceptance outside just the ‘quants’ and the ‘nerds’ community, managing to add a brilliant profile in the Forbes magazine to the excellent NY Times piece signifying its wide spread acceptability in 2009. Companies using R now include Motorola, Pfizer and the Bank of America. Pretty neat for an open source-once-small player!
To read more from our ongoing countdown to the year that was, read our previous instalments