Dane Skow presented some potential commercial alternatives for analysis software. The four tools reported on were:
In general these products all seem to be quite functional in the areas of data analysis and data presentation. They all have their own proprietary "4th generation languages" used for scripting and commands, but allow linking in your own C (C++?, Fortran?) code, run on lots of platforms, and allow import of various types of data streams. It is unclear how they scale to very large data set sizes, and what the costs would be (although at least one package, Matlab, has a freeware close, OCTAVE). Demo versions of each of these products are being acquired.
The capabilities of these products matched up fairly well with our requirements; more importantly a quick survey did not show any major additional functionality that we did not already have on our requirements list.