Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is seeking to boost its position in the cloud business industry by acquiring Revolution Analytics, a Mountain View, California-based startup involved with products and services based on the statistical programming language called R, a tool used to sift through data. The acquisition comes at a critical time when companies are increasingly seeing the need for more software on information analysis even as volumes of data also grow. The terms for the acquisition agreement were not disclosed.
The acquisition of Revolution Analytics by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) will help the company in spreading the use of advanced analytics in its products including Azure cloud, according to Revolution Analytics chief community officer David Smith, as reported by Bloomberg. Microsoft offers cloud computing services through the internet, contending with rivals such as Amazon.com, Inc.(NASDAQ:AMZN) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
Even before the agreement to buy Revolution Analytics, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) had already been using the R programming language when it developed the Xbox online gaming service’ match-making capabilities. R is also supported within Microsoft’s Azure ML framework, and is used to test and operate workflows that consists of R scripts in MLStudio. With the acquisition, “Microsoft has an opportunity to take significant strides in courting Data Scientists and other enterprise Big Data practitioners,” according to Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly, as quoted by the blog Silicon Angle. Kelly added that Microsoft must integrate R with current and future Big Data products even as it must increase activity with open source community to allow the continued development of R as an open source project.
Established in 2007, Revolution Analytics boasts of over 2 million customers. It is credited with Revolution R, an analytics solution based on R that is capable of working with large data warehouses and Hadoop systems while effectively merging with enterprise systems. Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Machine Learning Corporate Vice President, wrote in a blog post that the “acquisition will help customers use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure.”
This article has been written by Nonito Guntan.
