Microsoft announced its agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics, a leading commercial software and services provider for R programming language, which is widely-used for computing and predictive analytics.
Microsoft aims to help companies unlock big data insights
In a blog post, Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president, Machine Learning at Microsoft said the company decided to purchase Revolution Analytics to help more companies unlock big data insight with advanced analytics by using the power of R programming and data science.
According to Sirosh, companies need powerful analytical models to make data driven-decisions as the volumes of data continues to increase. He emphasized that a high-performance computation is required in making data-driven decisions.
Sirosh added that companies also need to reduce the gap in analytics skills and data science within their organizations. According to him, the R programming language will be beneficial to more employees. He said the “acquisition is part of our effort to address these customer needs.”
Acquisition will help customers use advance analytics
Sirosh emphasized that the “acquisition will help use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms on premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure.”
The software giant plan to take advantage of the services and technology of Revolution Analytics to empower enterprises, R developers, and data scientists so that they build analytics solutions and applications at scale more easily and cost effectively.
Revolution Analytics contributes to open source R projects
Revolution Analytics is a provider of enterprise-class platform for the development and deployment of R-based analytics solutions for large data warehouses and Hodoop systems that integrate with enterprise systems. It helps people and companies achieve the potential of big data through its Revolution R product line combined with expert advisory services and training.
Revolution Analytics is a regular contributor to open source R projects including ParallelR and RHadoop. The company supports more than 150R user groups worldwide.
According Sirosh, the employees of Revolution Analytics will join Microsoft. He said, “I firmly believe that we are at the threshold of a revolution in information technology driven by the use of statistics and scientific analyses on big data.”
Microsoft is a big user of R programming language
On the other hand, David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution Analystics said Microsoft is a big user and supporter of R programming language. He believed that their combined teams will more users use advanced analytics within the Microsoft data platform solutions.
“For our users and customers, nothing much will change with the acquisition. We’ll continue to support and develop the Revolution R family of products — including non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux. The free Revolution R Open project will continue to enhance open source R,” said Smith.
The terms of the acquisition agreement between Microsoft and Revolution Analystics were not disclosed.
