Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics. Formerly known as REvolution Computing, it's a software company that focuses on developing open-source and "open-core" versions of the free and open-source software R for enterprise, academic and analytics customers.
"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," said Microsoft in its official blog.
Founded in 2007, Revolution Analytics R service is similar to Red Hat's approach with Linux in the 1990s, as well as with its bolt-on additions for parallel processing. R doesn't natively handle datasets larger than main memory, and enables high performance computing, big data and the shift to analytics.
Before being acquired, R was considered as one of the most popular programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. With more than 2 million users, Revolution that highlights R with speed and scalability, succeed in making it enterprise-ready.
With Microsoft acquiring Revolution Analytics, the software giant will run R into its data platform products so companies, developers and data scientists can use it across on-premises, hybrid cloud and Azure public cloud environments.