The $300 million initiative that IBM Corp. launched last year to broaden the adoption of Apache Spark is kicking into high gear. At an event held in San Francisco today for users of the data crunching engine, the company unveiled a cloud service that promises to help expand its appeal by making it possible to write analytic models in the R programming language.

The syntax and the accompanying runtime component are maintained by a foundation called the R Consortium that received an investment from Big Blue in conjunction with the new offering’s debut. According to the group’s website, its user base includes more than two million data scientists around the world, a massive segment that will now able to take advantage of Spark’s capabilities thanks to IBM.

Data Science Experience, as the new service is called, provides all the tools needed to develop algorithms for the engine. Users are able to pull records from their companies’ infrastructure via pre-made connectors, refine the information into a form that lends itself to analysis and then run it through statistical formulas to extract the insights within. In addition, IBM provides 250 sample datasets that can be used to train machine learning algorithms and benchmark their processing speed.

The company wants to let organizations carry out all of their number-crunching activities in its public cloud. A company’s analytics team can share the models they create using Data Science Experience with their peers from the application development department, who are in turn able to operationalize the code using Big Blue’s hosted Bluemix toolkit. And it’s then possible to deploy the finished software on servers rented from its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Customers even have the option to tap the vendor’s professional services arm for help with the undertaking.

The value proposition pits IBM against Microsoft Corp., which offers a service called Azure Machine Learning that likewise enables users to build and deploy analytic algorithms on its public cloud. And Amazon Inc. is rumored to be working on a similar tool that will provide the ability to create artificial intelligence workloads using the Alphabet Inc.-created TensorFlow engine. Big Blue faces an uphill battle against the two web giants, but it’s nonetheless starting to attract big-name clients. The SETI Institute is using the company’s services to analyze telescope measurements for signs of extraterrestrial life, while the U.S. Women’s Cycling team processes performance metrics about its riders in the IBM Cloud.

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