This January, in what’s becoming a more common theme for Microsoft, the company announced it was acquiring big-data analytics firm Revolution Analytics. The Mountain View, California company founded in 2007, is most well known for developing and supporting the “R” statistical programming language, used by over 2 million people worldwide, and today, Microsoft and Revolution Analytics jointly announced that the acquisition is final and “Revolution Analytics is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, the Revolution Analytics team are now Microsoft employees”.
Microsoft has big plans for Revolution Analytics and R, as outlined in a Machine Learning Blog post this morning:
Moving forward, we will build R and Revolution’s technology into our data platform products so companies, developers and data scientists can use it across on-premises, hybrid cloud and Azure public cloud environments. For example, we will build R into SQL Server to provide enormously fast and scalable in-database analytics that can be deployed in an enterprise customer’s datacenter, on Azure, or in a hybrid combination. In addition, we will integrate Revolution’s scalable R distribution into Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning, making it much easier and faster to analyze big data, and to operationalize R code for production applications. We will also continue to support running Revolution R Enterprise across heterogeneous platforms including Linux, Teradata and Hadoop deployments. No matter where their data lives, customers and partners will be able to take advantage of R more quickly, simply and cost effectively than ever before.
Microsoft committed to continue support of the open source variants of R as well, and to carry forward “efforts to educate and train aspiring developers and data scientists who want to learn R”. Microsoft also announced plans to share more information, including demos and the roadmap, at this year’s Build and Ignite conferences, coming up at the end of the month and in early May.
Terms of the deal were not announced.
Further reading: Acquisitions, Big Data, Microsoft, Revolution Analytics
