Following the acquisition of text analysis company, Equivio, Microsoft has now announced that they plan to acquire Revolution Analytics which is the leading commercial provider of software and services for R; the most widely used language for advanced statistical computing.
Microsoft has explained that as the amount content of increases everyday, corporations require more sturdy analytical models to make decisions based on the collected volumes of data. Considering the sensitivity and the need for the analytical solution to be close to the data, R is a trusted tool for this task.
Revolution Analytics has over 2 million users worldwide, that includes some of the world"s largest banks, pharmaceutical companies and consulting services organizations. Microsoft aims to help all these customers find big data value with advanced statistical analysis with their blog post stating that:
This acquisition will help customers use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure. By leveraging Revolution Analytics technology and services, we will empower enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale.
[...] I am incredibly excited about Revolution Analytics technology and employees joining Microsoft. I firmly believe that we are at the threshold of a revolution in information technology driven by the use of statistics and scientific analysis on big data.
David Smith, Chief Community Officer at Revolution Analytics, was excited regarding the acquisition as well. He claimed that Microsoft is a big user of the R language too and uses it for the online matchmaking services on Xbox Live. Furthermore, the Redmond giant also supports R within the Azure ML framework, and the company"s data scientists also use it to apply machine learning to data collected from Bing, Office, and the Sales, Marketing and Finance departments.
Smith went on to explain their future initiatives:
We’re excited the work we’ve 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. We will continue to sponsor local R user groups and R events, and expand our support for community initiatives. We’ll also have more resources behind our open-source R projects including RHadoop, DeployR and the Reproducible R Toolkit. And of course, we’ll be able to add further enhancements to Revolution R and bring R capabilities to the Microsoft suite of products.
Microsoft stated that they have reached an agreement with Revolution Analytics and will "provide an update when the acquisition transaction is closed."
Source: Microsoft, Revolution Analytics|Images via Microsoft