Analytics Pioneer C. Hadlai “Tex” Hull reunites with CEO Norman Nie to help guide REvolution’s Development of the Next Generation of Predictive Analytics
REvolution Computing announced today that data analytics pioneer and co-creator of SPSS, C. Hadlai “Tex” Hull has joined the company as a technical and business advisor.
Hull will work directly with CEO Norman Nie and CTO David Champagne.
“It is wonderful to be reunited with Tex, as our relationship goes back more than 40 years,” said REvolution President and CEO Norman Nie. “We revolutionized data analytics once before at SPSS and we aim to do it again,” Nie continued. “Tex understands better than anyone the challenges facing existing data analytics solutions and will be instrumental helping to answer them with new technology based on the R language. With the addition of Tex to our already deep technical staff as well as the appointment of R’s co-creator Robert Gentleman to our Board, we have an extraordinary team in place to deliver a game-changing new generation of data analytics solutions.”
In his role as a consultant for REvolution, Hull will collaborate with management and the development team to help make REvolution R Enterprise even more efficient in handling large sets of mission-critical data.
“REvolution is an exciting company with great potential and Norman has assembled an impressive team,” Hull said. “I’m excited about taking REvolution R Enterprise to the next level and to help create the next generation of data analytics solutions.”
Nie and Hull began sharing ideas about statistical software as students at Stanford University in the 1960s. There, they co-developed a revolutionary statistical software system called SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) that more than four decades later would be purchased by IBM for a reported $1.2 billion.
For years after graduate school, Nie and Hull strived to develop the SPSS product and its adoption in the academic and professional communities. The mission was a success: SPSS was incorporated in 1975. Despite a lack of public or private funding, SPSS permeated the academic, public, and commercial markets en masse. NASA, the National Forest Service, Procter & Gamble and Anheuser Busch were among the early adopters who realized the value of SPSS.
Hull stayed with the company for more than 30 years after that, working as an administrator and programmer. He has retired from SPSS, but is still active in the development of computer systems architectures today and maintains a strong belief that data analytics will always play an integral role in both academia and the enterprise.
Hull said: “There’s so much data out there and without analytic tools, like the ones produced by REvolution for R, there’s no way of understanding it.”