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Microsoft Closes Acquisition of Revolution Analytics

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This blog post is authored by Joseph Sirosh , Corporate Vice President of Information Management & Machine Learning at Microsoft.

Earlier this year we announced our intent to acquire Revolution Analytics and today I’m happy to say we have closed the acquisition agreement.

It is my pleasure to welcome the Revolution team to Microsoft. Together we will help unlock the power of the R language for advanced analytics on big data.

R is the world’s most popular programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics, used by more than 2 million people worldwide. Revolution has made R enterprise-ready with speed and scalability for the largest data warehouses and Hadoop systems. For example, by leveraging Intel’s Math Kernel Library (MKL), the freely available Revolution R Open executes a typical R benchmark 2.5 times faster than the standard R distribution and some functions, such as linear regression, run up to 20 times faster. With its unique parallel external memory algorithms, Revolution R Enterprise is able to deliver speeds 42 times faster than competing technology from SAS.

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.

As I said in January, we are excited to foster the open source evolution of R fueled by its active, passionate community. We are excited to support and amplify Revolution’s open source projects such as the fast Revolution R Open distribution, the ParallelR collection of packages for distributed programming, Rhadoop for running R on Hadoop nodes, DeployR for deploying R analytics in web and dashboard applications, the Reproducible R Toolkit and RevoPemaR for writing parallel external memory algorithms. We will continue to support and evolve these and the commercial distributions of Revolution R across multiple operating systems.

As part of our commitment to help close the data scientist and analytics skills gap, we will also carry forward Revolution’s efforts to educate and train aspiring developers and data scientists who want to learn R, leveraging the breadth and depth of our global programs and partner ecosystem.

I am excited about the road ahead as we bring enterprise grade R implementations to the most widely used database in the world and to the reach and scale of Azure. For those of you who plan to attend Build 2015 or Ignite, I will share more information about Revolution’s products at my keynotes sessions there, including demos and our roadmap – so please do tune in. We’ll also share more information on this blog as we progress forward. For now, if you have suggestions or feedback, please share them with us here.

You can also read a blog post by David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution Analytics, here.

Joseph

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2015
    Congratulations to the REvolutions Analytics team for joining Microsoft, I hope they'll feel right at home with all the other 100.000 highly talented people who already work at Microsoft. ;-)
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2015
    Its a great news!! and important steps towards making AML a wonderful platform....
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2015
    Hope most people use Azure ML instead of AML. AML is a form of cancer when people hear it. Once a negative catenation is attached it is hard to shake it off.
  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2015
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2015
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2015
    This is great news, I was going to switch to R programing but have been on the fence for a few years, I will move forward!! Thank You MicroSoft
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2015
    Great news! Please take the opportunity to add proper base functionality to R in Windows. The main issues that strike are (1) issues with getting anti-aliased graphics to work, (2) gputools are not ported, (3) R is not fully tested with folder names that include spaces, (4) improved git/github integration (ssh keys don't work properly with RStudio - not really an R issue but certainly an argument agains Windows that I commonly hear).
  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2015
    Microsoft and R is a promising marriage and I'm very curious to where the journey goes!
  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2015
    It will be interesting to see what the combination of SQL Server and R will bring to the user community. Also keen to see how it will be implemented.
  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2015
    Mientras las agencias de gobierno, desde el nivel federal hasta el municipal, se esfuerzan por cumplir