On April 6, Microsoft officals announced the company had completed its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, the maker of a distribution of the R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics.
Microsoft is planning to build R into SQL Server, said Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Information Management and Machine Learning, enabling customers to deploy it in a datacenter, on Azure or in a hybrid configuration. Microsoft also will integrate Revolution's R distribution into Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning to make it easier to analyze big data, he said.
Microsoft officials reiterated today that they remain committed to supporting the open-source evolution of R, Revolution's open-source projects and also the commercial distributions of Revolution's R across multiple platforms, including Linux, Teradata and Hadoop.
Revolution Analytics provided an "enterprise-class' platform for developing and deploying R-based analytic solutions that can work across large data warehouses and Hadoop systems, and which integrate with enterprise systems. Revolution R customers include banks, financial services organizations, pharmaceutical companies, consulting companies, and manufacturing and technology companies.