Microsoft followed up its hologram-studded Windows 10 launch event on Friday with the equally significant acquisition of Revolution Analytics Inc. for an undisclosed amount. The landmark deal addresses two of Redmond’s most important strategic priorities.

The eight-year-old Revolution Analytics commercalizes R, a programming language designed specifically to perform statistical analysis that has soared in popularity over recent years with the rise of data scientists. That’s an audience that Microsoft is actively trying to court with its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, which sports a store that allows users to freely exchange the kind of data crunching algorithms that the framework is used to create among one another.

The ML Marketplace is part of Azure Machine Learning, a managed analytics engine that is already compatible with R and over 350 third party libraries from the upstream ecosystem. The acquisition paves the way for Redmond to extend that support a step further to the development phase, potentially providing a much-needed boost for the service amid intensifying competition from rival cloud providers.

Google boasts an entire set of machine learning tools on its platform, while Amazon poses an even more formidable threat with Kinesis, a multi-purpose stream processing service introduced all the way back in November, 2013. But, neither supports R as extensively as Microsoft, an edge that the deal should further significantly.

The biggest asset that the software giant is gaining through the transaction is Revolution Analytics’ commercial R implementation, a major improvement over the original open-source version that removes the need to store all the data for a project in the memory of the machine on which it’s running. Instead, the engine keeps information on disk and only loads it as needed in chunks of up to 16 terbyates, which allows users to train their algorithms much more effectively and thereby enhance the accuracy of the results coming out of the other end.

Hooking up Revolution R to Azure, as Micoroft has done with its homegrown development platform, could help foster participation in ML Marketplace and create a bigger choice of pre-packaged analytic functions for customers. That would make Azure that much more attractive for machine learning workloads than the competition.

However, it’s worth noting that the acquisition is as much about data scientists themselves as their algorithms. The so-called “unicorns” of the IT workforce have become a powerful force in the industry whose ranks are swelling rapidly as vendors such as Cloudera Inc. continue collaborating with educational institutions to churn more and more analytics-savvy professionals.

With McKinsey & Company expecting hundreds of thousands of new data science jobs to open in the next few years, that audience represents a massive future market for development tools that Redmond is clearly eager to address. The acquisition of Revolution Analytics puts it in a prime position to do so, making the deal a double-win for Nadella’s Microsoft.