Altair Acquires World Programming to Advance Organizations’ Digital Transformation

Altair has acquired World Programming, a UK-based technology company specializing in data analytics software. World Programming's platform supports development and execution of multi-language software solutions leveraging popular languages used in data science including Python, R, and the SAS language in a single program.

“We are excited to integrate World Programming's exceptional team and technology into Altair and see this acquisition as a significant opportunity to help companies transition to hybrid architectures using modern, open technologies and languages while preserving, protecting, and leveraging the best elements of existing technology such as the SAS language,” says James R. Scapa, founder and chief executive officer of Altair. 

World Programming brings a customer base of approximately 500 enterprise customers worldwide. As organizations increasingly seek open-source solutions to accelerate their big data initiatives and embrace a more modern and flexible environment, the acquisition of World Programming will strengthen Altair's foothold in several industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, asset management, telecommunications, retail, energy and consumer products. 

The acquisition includes World Programming's flagship product, WPS Analytics, which is backed by more than two decades of experience and developed to meet the increasing use of open-source languages. WPS Analytics is asoftware platform for scalable data manipulation and analytics, with several features including: 

• Ability to run programs written in SAS language syntax without the need to install any third-party products  
• Fully integrated SAS language support  
• Support for SQL, Python, R and Hadoop and for exchanging data, all inside a single program 
• Advanced math, statistics and machine learning algorithms 
• Ability to access multiple data sources including big data, cloud and mainframe  
• Ability to use standalone or with enterprise management facilities including data access control and model deployment to on-demand APIs  
• Flexible deployment to link on-premises, mainframe and cloud environments 

“Customers want choice and integrating with Altair—an organization with a trusted and reliable open-architecture philosophy—will give users easy access to technologies in a flexible and intuitive environment,” says Oliver Robinson, chief executive officer, World Programming. “Altair will help to accelerate access to our solutions as we converge the modern world of best-in-class open-source technologies with the ability to support decades of investment in the SAS language.”

World Programming's software will be integrated into Altair's data analytics solutions suite and available via Altair Units, which gives customers easy access to Altair's entire portfolio of software solutions.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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