Microsoft grows big data and analytics leadership with R and Revolution Analytics acquisition

R is the world’s dominant programming language for big data predictive analytics and statistical computing. Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provided of software and services for R. Microsoft’s acquisition of Revolution Analytics will help customers use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale. This very much supports the vibrant R community of over 2 million users worldwide and the open source R projects such as ParallelR, and RHadoop, and helps support more than 150 R user groups across the world. As noted by Microsoft’s Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President Machine Learning, “Additionally, we are excited to help foster the open source evolution of R and, particularly, the community of people that drives that evolution. We will continue to support and evolve both open source and commercial distributions of Revolution R across multiple operating systems. This builds on Microsoft’s existing participation in open source, such as contributions to projects like Hive, YARN, REEF and others in the Apache Hadoop community, our support for Linux and open source technologies on Microsoft Azure, and the wide range of open source work by Microsoft Open Technologies. This is closely related to our Microsoft Azure for Research and Education programs, as well.”