CloseClinical is a website based on web 2.0 technology which aims to prmote relationships health and clinical research informatics in business world.

R prgramming language is a free and open source language and working environment for statistical computing and data mining, which is distributed under GNU licence. It has become the preferred language of academics in the domain of biostatistics and bioinformatics. The growing number of contributed packages have provided R with numerous functionalities. Some serious project such as bioconductor project, have further increased its penetration in the domain of genomics and biotechnology. More over, R graph gallery is proabably the most comprehensive collection of data visualisation funtionalities which have ever existed in a free or commercial statistical software.

However, companies are still working with SAS System of SAS Institute, which is a software framework for data entry, retrieval, management ad mining. A friend of mine has recently obtained his PhD in bioinformatics, and for finding a job in a company, he finally had to obtain a SAS certificate, although he had done all of his thesis working with R. Do companies have to choose SAS instead of R for finding clients or making projects?

For companies the situation is a little different. Let's see why a company may prefer to choose R as its statistical analysis software?

• It is available for no cost.
• Functions' source codes are open.
• There are more
• The software evolution is more rapid.
• Communitiy and especially academic support.

And why a company may prefer to use SAS?

• Its database is enhanced for large volumes of data.
• Data management is easier.
• The software is more user friendly.

If you are a company which manupulate data bases with mild to moderate turn over, R is a better choice for you. If you are a company with a large amount of data entry and data management, and thus with a large turn data over, you will need SAS. Enough documentation and support is now available in both cases. If you are already using SAS and you want to change for R to reduce your costs, do not forget to consider the cost of this migration, but in anyway such a change will reduce your costs.

If you want the software more for business analysis and less for biomedical computing, know that SAS is the leading company in the domain. However, a good R programmer can do also high quality business analysis with R.