by David Smith, Chief Community Officer
On behalf of the entire Revolution Analytics team I am excited to announce that Revolution Analytics is joining forces with Microsoft to bring R to even more enterprises. Microsoft announced today that it will acquire Revolution Analytics.
Now, Microsoft might seem like a strange bedfellow for an open-source company, but the company continues to make great strides in the open-source arena recently. Microsoft has embraced Linux as a fully-supported operating system on its Azure cloud service. (CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed “Microsoft loves Linux” in foot-high letters at a press event back in October.) Microsoft supports Hadoop with Azure HDInsight and has partnered with Hortonworks to extend open-source Hadoop for the enterprise. (In 2013, Microsoft open-sourced REEF to provide a big-data analytics framework for YARN.) The .NET Core is now open-source, providing an alternative developer framework to Java.
Microsoft has been an active participant in many other open source projects, too. There are over 1,600 OSS projects from Microsoft on CodePlex and GitHub. Microsoft engineers have actively contributed to the Linux kernel for years, and the company has contributed to open source community projects including Chef, Puppet, Docker, MongoDB, Redis and OpenJDK. Microsoft blogs regularly provide information and resources for open-source tools, including Chef, Puppet and Docker.
And Microsoft is a big user of R. Microsoft used R to develop the match-making capabilities of the Xbox online gaming service. It’s the tool of choice for data scientists at Microsoft, who apply machine learning to data from Bing, Azure, Office, and the Sales, Marketing and Finance departments. Microsoft supports R extensively within the Azure ML framework, including the ability to experiment and operationalize workflows consisting of R scripts in MLStudio.
We’re excited the work we’ve done with Revolution R will come to a wider audience through Microsoft. Our combined teams will be able to help more users use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platform solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. And just as importantly, the big-company resources of Microsoft will allow us to invest even more in the R Project and the Revolution R products. We will continue to sponsor local R user groups and R events, and expand our support for community initiatives. We’ll also have more resources behind our open-source R projects including RHadoop, DeployR and the Reproducible R Toolkit. And of course, we’ll be able to add further enhancements to Revolution R and bring R capabilities to the Microsoft suite of products.
For our users and customers, nothing much will change with the acquisition. We’ll continue to support and develop the Revolution R family of products — including non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux. The free Revolution R Open project will continue to enhance open source R. We’ll continue to offer expert technical support for R with Revolution R Plus subscriptions from the same team of R experts. We’ll continue to advance the big data and enterprise integration capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise. And we’ll continue to offer expert technical training and consulting services.
This is an exciting new chapter for the Revolution Analytics team. I’m proud to be a part of it, and everyone here is excited about the possibilities and the future. Stay tuned for more great things to come when the transaction is closed. If you have questions or comments, feel free to add your thoughts below.
Official Microsoft Blog: Microsoft to acquire Revolution Analytics
Hi David,
That's exciting news! Can you comment on the integration of Revo R into Excel or SQL Server?
Cheers,
Bob
Posted by: Bob Muenchen | January 23, 2015 at 08:31
Hi Bob, we don't have any specific details on integration plans yet, but we'll share here when we do. And thanks!
Posted by: David Smith | January 23, 2015 at 08:39
Yeeks! Just don't fuck it up.
Posted by: LoveR | January 23, 2015 at 09:16
What a joke. You're really working hard to try and convince readers that this is a good match, going on and on about how supportive Microsoft is of open-source. You were probably sweating while trying to come up with excuses as to why this is good, knowing that you were typing bullshit. I would suggest growing a pair of balls and just being honest, but I'm sure you've never had to do that in your career.
Posted by: Anonymous | January 23, 2015 at 11:22
This is super exciting!
As a CTO from a recently acquired HPC Cloud company (GreenButton) into Azure with a similarly broad range of customers and open-source technology, I can assure you you've made a good decision and Revolution Analytics and your customers are in great hands. There's no better time to be part of Microsoft and it's an incredibly exciting time to be working for the company!
So welcome. I'm sure there'll be opportunities for us to work together (I'm on the Azure Big Compute team). See you soon!
Posted by: Dave Fellows | January 23, 2015 at 11:24
Anonymous, I've never been anything but frank on this blog and this is no exception. I'm truly excited for the future, and I'm sure I speak for the rest of the team as well.
Posted by: David Smith | January 23, 2015 at 11:25
Awesome news!! Just started developing some analytics to be deployed on Azure. Was thinking of using RRE on HDInsights. Super excited to hear this news.
Posted by: Maddy | January 23, 2015 at 11:39
When Microsoft wiil offer a R version to Surface ?
Posted by: Francisco | January 23, 2015 at 11:51
Anyone else find it funny that the guy telling David to grow a pair of balls refused to sign his name to his post?
Posted by: Stephen Widersham | January 23, 2015 at 12:20
Excellent news, extend R to a larger user community
Posted by: John | January 23, 2015 at 12:50
WOW!
Congratulations David! I wish you and others in REvoluion a lot of luck and success with this major change.
With regards,
Tal
Posted by: Tal Galili | January 23, 2015 at 14:21
Thanks Tal! And thanks for all the great work on r-bloggers.com. Such a service to the community.
Posted by: David Smith | January 23, 2015 at 14:26
Well, grats, I guess... But why? Is there any good reason besides the money? Just remember what Microsoft did to Nokia...
I just hope that at least you will pay more attention to OpenSUSE now since Novell de facto belongs to Microsoft too.
Posted by: Yury | January 23, 2015 at 15:27
Not happy - Part of R's charm was that it was unemcumbered with a large Corporate problems. Time to market and market share will drive it from now on.
Posted by: Tim Washburn | January 23, 2015 at 18:02
Congrats David. This is a great outcome. I think the haters are always gonna hate, but the MSFT of 2015 is quite different from that of the past. They are embracing cloud, open standards and even open source. Lets see what this team can continue to deliver!
--Zack
Posted by: ZUrlocker | January 23, 2015 at 18:11