Microsoft quietly made available this week a new family of R Server data-analytics products.

Thanks to a tweet from Tero Alhonen, I found listings on MSDN for a family of new Microsoft R Server products with January 4, 2016 release dates.

The new line-up includes:

Microsoft R Server for Hadoop on Red Hat

Microsoft R Server for Teradata DB

Microsoft R Server for Red Hat Linux

Microsoft R Server for SuSE Linux

RRE, which is Revolution R Enterprise, I believe. (Thanks, Marko!)

Here's the description on MSDN as to what these R servers are:

"Microsoft R Server is a fast and cost-effective enterprise-class big data advanced analytics platform supporting a variety of big data statistics, predictive modeling and machine learning capabilities. Microsoft R Server includes Open Source R and is fully compatible with R scripts, functions and CRAN packages, and offers a variety of analytics capabilities including exploratory data analysis, model building and model deployment."

R is a programming language for computational statistics. Microsoft last April completed its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, the maker of a distribution of the R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics, for an undisclosed amount.

Microsoft previously announced it plans to build R support directly into SQL Server 2016. Microsoft also announced last year plans to integrate Revolution's R distribution into the Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning services.

Microsoft execs also said last year they would continue to support the open-source evolution of R, as well as the commercial distributions of Revolution R across multiple platforms, including Linux, Teradata and Hadoop.

I believe the new R Server products available to MSDN subscribers are the renamed versions of the promised commercial distributions of Revolution R. I've asked Microsoft officials for clarification, pricing and more details. No word back so far.

Update (January 6): There's a new Microsoft blog post that notes the R Servers are now also available to academics and students via DreamSpark. And there's a page with information about "Microsoft R Open," which is described as the "enhanced distribution of R from Microsoft." Microsoft R Open is a prerequisite for Microsoft R Server 2016 and RRE 2016, according to that page.

(Thanks, again, to Tero Alhonen for these latest links to the R Server information.)