It’s official! We announced back in January that Microsoft would acquire Revolution Analytics and today, that process is complete. Revolution Analytics is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, the Revolution Analytics team are now Microsoft employees, and we couldn’t be more excited.

As we mentioned back in January, nothing much will change for our customers and community. We’ll continue to support and develop the Revolution R family of products — including on non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux. The free Revolution R Open project will continue to enhance open source R. We’ll continue to advance the big data and enterprise integration capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise. Our R experts will continue to offer technical support, training and consulting services for R. And we’ll continue to support the open source R project and its community of more than 2 million users around the world.

There are more than 150 local R user groups worldwide.

Since 2007, Revolution Analytics’ mission has been to drive adoption of R in the enterprise. Now as part of Microsoft, we’ll have even more avenues to achieve that goal. As Joseph Sirosh, Corporate VP of Machine Learning details in a blog post today, one task will be to integrate R with SQL Server on servers and in the Azure cloud to bring enormously fast and scalable in-database analytics to SQL Server data. Another will be to integrate R and Revolution Analytics’ ScaleR algorithms into Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning, to make it much easier and faster to analyze big data and to use R in production applications. All while continuing to support running Revolution R Enterprise running in Linux, Teradata and Hadoop. As Joseph notes, all of these activities will extend the reach of R:

No matter where their data lives, customers and partners will be able to take advantage of R more quickly, simply and cost effectively than ever before.

For Dave Rich, CEO of Revolution Analytics and now General Manager, Advanced Analytics at Microsoft, this combination represents the opportunity of a new enterprise management wave, going beyond today’s analytics to a new discipline:

Truly pervasive data driven decision-making, used throughout the enterprise, without exception. Delivery of big data analytics to all roles within a company — no matter the size — will make "Decision Process Reengineering" to the next decade what "Business Process Reengineering" has been to the previous two decades. It’s as simple as that. The CIO and CDO will need an easy-to-use, integrated platform and a vendor partner who simultaneously understands end-user productivity, cloud computing, and data platforms. Who better to deliver this to companies large and small than Microsoft? All Microsoft needed was a bridge to crowd-sourced innovation on the advanced analytics algorithms and tools powering results from Big Data. Who better than Revolution Analytics? Stay tuned. Now it gets interesting.

You can read more of Dave’s thoughts in his message, Comments on Joining Microsoft. As for me, I’m sure I speak for the entire team when I say how excited I am to be here at the beginning of this next phase. I look forward to documenting the journey here on the blog — there’s much more to come.