IBM Corp.’s push to widen the adoption of Watson is not a solo effort. The company is actively recruiting the help of partners like Ohio’s Columbus Collaboratory LLC, which launched a new open-source imitative today that aims to make the analytics platform more easily accessible.

Dubbed CognizeR, the project provides a library for the R statistical programming language that makes it possible to interact with the Watson Developer Cloud using native code. Only about half a dozen key functions are currently supported, but Columbus Collaboratory and IBM plan on adding integration with more of the services in the platform over time. Their library removes the need to write API calls in a third party language such as Python or Java, which should be a major convenience for the roughly two million data scientists out there who build number-crunching algorithms using R.

The release of CognizeR comes just over two months after Big Blue joined the open-source body that oversees the development of the programming language as a Platinum Member. The only other two organizations in the same bracket are a startup called RStudio Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which has been working even more aggressively than Big Blue to court the R community. The company provides extensive support for the technology in its Azure public cloud platform and owns Revolution Analytics, a top statistical software provider that came aboard through an acquisition early last year.

Both IBM and Redmond share the same goal of making their respective cloud platforms more attractive for data scientists. Microsoft has a lead of sorts since it’s been involved with the R community for much longer, but Big Blue is starting to gain ground. The release of CognizeR marks another milestone in its effort that is made all the more significant because Columbus Collaboratory is involved.

The outfit isn’t a simple technology or services vendor like most of the technology giant’s partners, but rather serves a sort of joint research hub for seven of Ohio’s largest companies. Columbus Collaboratory  presumably  developed CognizeR because some of its sponsors are interested in making better use of Watson internally, or are at least exploring the possibility of doing so. This could reflect a broader interest in the platform among R users that should bode well for IBM’s long-term plans.

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