Microsoft has bought Revolution Analytics, best known for producing developer tools for R programming language and Big Data analytics.
As the vast quantities of Big Data grows, the need for data scientists and high quality analytics increase. Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President, Machine Learning, wrote on the Microsoft blog: "This requires high performance computation that is "close" to the data, and scales with the business’ needs over time."
"At the same time, companies need to reduce the data science and analytics skills gap inside their organizations, so more employees can use and benefit from R. This acquisition is part of our effort to address these customer needs."
Revolution Analytics contributes to open source R projects such as ParallelR and RHadoop, which Microsoft has vowed to continue to support.
Sirosh wrote: "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."
