Microsoft is acquiring Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software and services for R, a programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics using big data. The purchase was announced in a blog by Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president, Machine Learning, Microsoft.
According to Sirosh, as data grows rapidly in industries such as financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, research, they need powerful analytical models to make data-driven decisions. This requires high performance computation that is “close” to the data, and scales with the business’ needs over time. Simultaneously they need to reduce the data science and analytics skills gap inside their organizations so that more people can use and benefit from R.
Revolution Analytics provides an enterprise-class platform for the development and deployment of R-based analytic solutions that can scale across large data warehouses and Hadoop systems, and can integrate with enterprise systems. It offers the Revolution R product line, expert advisory services as well as training to help people and companies gain value from big data using statistical, scientific methodologies. Revolution Analytics also regularly contributes to open source R projects such as ParallelR, and RHadoop.