The growing trend of analytics vendors taking their software to the public cloud has been joined by an academic stalwart that is still little-known in the enterprise arena: Wolfram Research Inc., best known as the company behind the Mathematica technical computing engine, one of the most tried-and-tested instruments on the data scientist’s toolbelt.

The platform is the brainchild of British mathematician Stephen Wolfram, who created it during a brief tenure with the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in the mid-1980s and has been improving on the original formula ever since through his namesake company. What started out as a relatively straightforward algebra program has evolved over the decades into one of the most comprehensive tools of its kind with capabilities  for mining meaning from text, tuning machine learning algorithms and visualizing complex datasets.

Last July, Wolfram and his team kicked it up a notch with a package that enables analysts to use  Mathematica to implement algorithms in the MapReduce framework powering Hadoop and automatically sync the code with the master node of their batch processing clusters. Now, the company is taking its efforts to a whole new level with a cloud-based version of its flagship software that supports collaboration among users.

Mathematica Online makes it possible to set permissions at the file level, Stephen Wolfram wrote in a blog announcing the service. That kind of access control is useful – and necessary – in scenarios ranging from classroom environments where each student needs a private copy of coursework to corporate settings with rigid compliance requirements.

But while Mathematica Online may meet the needs of academia, it’s not quite ready for  enterprise primetime. At launch, the service only works with files stored on Wolfram Research’s public cloud, which limits its usefulness for organizations with sensitive workloads that can’t be moved outside the firewall for security or other reasons. That’s only a temporary setback, however. The company plans to give customers the option of deploying the platform on their own infrastructure in the foreseeable future.

Regardless of whether their organizations are running Mathematica Online in the cloud or on-premise, users can access the service from any browser. There are also native mobile clients in the works. The apps  are set to roll out over the next few months alongside several other new offerings based on the Mathemtica stack, notably the Wolfram Data Science Platform and a complementary discovery tool.

photo credit: just.Luc via photopin cc