Software king of the world Microsoft announced a deal to buy Revolution Analytics, the top commercial provider of software and services for the open-source R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics.
Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft corporate vice president for machine learning, said the acquisition was to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Revolution Analytics is based in California with offices in London and Singapore.
David Smith, Revolution Analytics’ chief community officer, said that he was excited the work done with Revolution R will come to a wider audience through Microsoft.
“Our combined teams will be able to help more users use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platform solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. And just as importantly, the big-company resources of Microsoft will allow us to invest even more in the R Project and the Revolution R products.”
However Revolution is Open Source and uses the R programming language, which is a data analysis tool widely used by both academics and corporate data scientists. Revolution Analytics was best known for offering developer tools for use with the R language, and though Microsoft already works with R it is a huge change in direction to own something like Revolution.
Revolution was founded in 2007 by Yale University computer scientists to create a suite of tools for working with R. The company develops both a free, open source community version of its Revolution R suite of developer tools, as well as paid commercial versions of the software.
Revolution Analytics created tools that extended the open source version of the R language to help it get under the bonnet of big data.
Microsoft will continue to support Revolution’s existing products and customers.
