Microsoft has acquired Revolution Analytics to enhance its open source services and set free the power of the R programming language.
The software giant will work with Revolution Analytics to evolve the R platform and continue to support both open source and commercial distributions of Revolution R across operating systems.
Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Machine Learning at Microsoft, said in a blog post: "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.
"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."
Revolution Analytics said one of the reasons it made the decision to integrate with Microsoft was because the PC manufacturer has demonstrated its dedication to open source environments in recent years, with CEO Satya Nadella proclaiming Microsoft loves Linux last October.
David Smith, the firm's chief community officer said: "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."
The news comes after Microsoft announced its integration with Python, an alternative programming platform with data science and visualisation software features.
Sirosh finished: "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."
