Columbus Collaboratory, a consortium of Ohio-based companies that are banding together to focus on solving knotty problems using analytics, has released an open-source extension to the R programming language that data scientists can use to access and build with IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence supercomputer.

The Collaboratory, whose members include American Electric Power Company Inc., Battelle Memorial Institute Inc., Cardinal Health Inc., Huntington National Bank Inc., L Brands Inc., Nationwide Insurance Enterprise Inc. and OhioHealth Group Ltd., said the new CognizeR technology enables data scientists to “bypass having to code the calls to the cognitive APIs in another language, such as Java or Python, and tap directly into Watson APIs without leaving their own native development environment.” It said the release is part of its campaign to advance the adoption of cognitive computing, a term. IBM has coined for Watson and a variety of its other analytical initiatives.

R is a GNU-licensed language for statistical computing and graphics that’s used by an estimated 2 million developers.

Watson services available through CognizeR include Watson Language Translation, Personality Insights, Tone Analyzer, Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Visual Recognition. IBM said it will collect feedback from users of the R extension to help in delivering additional cognitive services.

“We’ll be able to continually improve the experience by adding the cognitive services that data scientists want and need the most,” said said Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, IBM fellow and director of Watson Content Services at IBM, in a prepared statement.

The inclusion of companies like Nationwide and Huntington should be a boost for IBM, which is grappling with difficulty selling Watson to budget-stressed business. Reuters reported today that Watson is encountering resistance in the banking sector, where low interest rates have depressed budgets. Watson promises transformative benefits to business processes, but the long payoff time competes with more immediate investment priorities.

Health care-focused companies like OhioHealth, Cardinal Health and Battelle thave needed less convincing. Their need to mine through vast amounts of clinical and research data to identify patterns that could lead to more cost-effective treatments is driving huge investments in big data. Venture capitalists poured more than $1 billion into healthcare IT sector during the first quarter of this year and IBM itself shelled out more than $3.6 billion in the last year alone to purchase health care technology companies Truven Healthcare Analytics Inc. and Merge Healthcare, Inc. with the stated intention of merging them with Watson.