Microsoft to acquire Revolution Analytics

Microsoft continues its corporate acquisition spree with another move that aims to improve the company's data platforms' capabilities. In a post published on Friday by The Official Microsoft Blog, Microsoft's Machine Learning Corporate Vice President Joseph Sirosh announced that the Redmond giant "has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics." This company is the top commercial provider of services and software for R, which is the most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics in the world.

As the blog post mentioned above says, the purpose of this move by Microsoft is "to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics." By taking over Revolution Analytics, Microsoft also gains access to a community of more than 2 million users, as well as the company's rich customer portfolio, which includes "some of the world’s largest banks and financial services organizations, pharmaceutical companies, consulting services organizations, manufacturing and technology companies."

The financial terms of the deal are not public, but both Microsoft and Revolution Analytics mentioned a few interesting things in their posts regarding this agreement. Microsoft currently uses the R programming language for the Xbox online gaming service and also offers R support within the Azure ML framework. Statistics and scientific analysis of big data are now a vital part of Microsoft's impressive arsenal and remains to see what the future holds for Revolution Analytics as an asset of the Redmond giant.