Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics to add to big-data portfolio

Microsoft yesterday said it would add to its huge Big Data portfolio with the acquisition of Revolution Analytics, a company that specialised in products and services based on the R programming language.

R, the de facto language standard for many big data / Apace Hadoop developers has come to enjoy a huge increase in popularity based on its  its statistical computing specialisation that attracted many data scientists, data miners and data developers.

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, Microsoft says it will empower enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale.

Mountain View, California-based Revolution Analytics offers an enterprise-class platform called Revolution R for building and deploying R-based analytics solutions capable of scaling to work with large data warehouses and Hadoop systems even as it integrated with enterprise systems. The 2007 founded company claims over 2 million customers.

"This acquisition will help customers use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure," said Microsoft exec Joseph Sirosh in a blog post today. "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."

"Additionally, we are excited to help foster the open source evolution of R and, particularly, the community of people that drives that evolution. We will continue to support and evolve both open source and commercial distributions of Revolution R across multiple operating systems,"Sirosh added.

Microsoft said it made the acquisition ''to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics,'' Tech Crunch reported. The financial details of the transaction were not detailed by the companies.

David Smith, Revolution Analytics' chief community officer said, in a Revolution blog post, "Microsoft is a big user of R. Microsoft used R to develop the match-making capabilities of the Xbox online gaming service. It's the tool of choice for data scientists at Microsoft, who apply machine learning to data from Bing, Azure, Office, and the Sales, Marketing and Finance departments.

Revolution Analytics offers several tools around the R language and like many open-source projects, it offered many of them for free and then charged for things like consulting, technical support, training and indemnification packages. The company also provided an enterprise extension to R that allowed for parallelised analytics and a cloud-based service that was available on demand through Amazon's AWS Marketplace.

The company had raised just under $38 million since its founding in 2007 and its investors included Intel Capital and North Bridge Venture Partners.

While it might still seem somewhat odd for Microsoft to acquire an open-source company, it had actually invested quite heavily in its own open-source initiatives around .NET and other projects lately.

As noted by Revolution Analytics' chief community officer David Smith the company has also embraced Linux and Hadoop, and contributed to projects like Chef, Puppet, Docker and others.