Update: April 6, 2015: Microsoft has closed the acquisition of Revolution Analytics. For more details, please read the blog post by Joseph Sirosh here.

I’m very pleased to announce that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. We are making this acquisition to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics.

As their volumes of data continually grow, organizations of all kinds around the world – financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, research – need powerful analytical models to make data-driven decisions. 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 provides an enterprise-class platform for the development and deployment of R-based analytic solutions that can scale across large data warehouses and Hadoop systems, and can integrate with enterprise systems. Its Revolution R product line, combined with its expert advisory services and training, help people and companies realize the potential of big data using sound statistical, scientific methodologies. Top customers include some of the world’s largest banks and financial services organizations, pharmaceutical companies, consulting services organizations, manufacturing and technology companies. Revolution Analytics is also an important part of the vibrant R community of over 2 million users worldwide. The company regularly contributes to open source R projects such as ParallelR, and RHadoop, and helps support more than 150 R user groups across the world.

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.

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. This builds on Microsoft’s existing participation in open source, such as contributions to projects like Hive, YARN, REEF and others in the Apache Hadoop community, our support for Linux and open source technologies on Microsoft Azure, and the wide range of open source work by Microsoft Open Technologies. This is closely related to our Microsoft Azure for Research and Education programs, as well.

As a data scientist and longtime R enthusiast, 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 analyses on big data. We will provide an update when the acquisition transaction is closed.

You can also read a blog post by David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution Analytics, here.

Thanks,

Joseph