Microsoft Joins the R Consortium

06/30/2015

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By Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President, Information Management & Machine Learning, Microsoft

R is a rapidly evolving language for statistical data analysis that’s driving innovation in the field of data sciences. Microsoft is part of the R community and together, we're pushing R forward to fuel even greater results. This week the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization, announced the R Consortium. This new organization will strengthen both the technical and user communities as a Collaborative Project hosted by Linux Foundation. Microsoft is among the founding companies and organizations, and David Smith, Principal Program Manager of Machine Learning at Microsoft, was instrumental in the creation and incorporation of the R Consortium.

The R Consortium will complement the work of the R Foundation, a nonprofit organization that maintains the language, and will focus on user outreach and other projects designed to assist the R user and developer communities. This includes both technical and infrastructure projects such as building and maintaining mirrors for downloading R, testing, QA resources, financial support for the annual useR! Conference, and promotion and support of worldwide user groups. We are excited to help foster the continuing growth of R and the community of people that drives its evolution.

In addition, we’re investing in enabling more customers to use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure. It’s been just over two months since Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics and together, we are realizing the vision of empowering enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale. Since the acquisition, we announced that R will be shipped in SQL Server 2016.

Our efforts to build R into more Microsoft products and services, combined with our contribution to the R Consortium as a Platinum Member, gives me confidence that we’re helping today’s data scientists and business leaders to drive innovation and advances in the field of data science with R.

You can find out more about our involvement in the R Consortium in a post from David Smith on the Revolutions blog.

Joseph