Microsoft has completed its takeover of Revolution Analytics, the company that 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. Revolution Analytics offers the Revolution R suite of tools that makes it possible to gain insights from large data sets.

While the terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, few are denying the gravity of the implications. As Wikibon’s Principal Big Data analyst Jeff Kelly explained at the time the acquisition was first announced: “With the proposed acquisition of Revolution Analytics, Wikibon believes Microsoft has an opportunity to take significant strides in courting Data Scientists and other enterprise Big Data practitioners. It must continue to invest resources in Revolution Analytics’ core products, tightly integrate R with Microsoft’s existing and future Big Data portfolio of products, and, importantly, increase its activity with the open source community to ensure R continues to develop as an open source project in and of itself.”

Microsoft’s offerings will certainly get a welcome boost from the integration of Revolution’s tech. That’s because Revolution R Open, the free open-source version of the company’s software, clocks in at 2.5 times faster than the regular open-source R distribution when it comes to executing a typical R benchmark. Redmond chiefs admitted as much when they explained how they plan to integrate Revolution’s tech, saying it will be used for a variety of Big Data purposes. These include the addition of R to SQL Server to enable in-database analytics, and the addition of Revolution’s scalable R (ScaleR) distribution to Azure Machine Learning and Azure HDInsight.

“We will build R and Revolution’s technology into our data platform products so companies, developers, and data scientists can use it across on-premises, hybrid cloud and Azure public cloud environments,” Joseph Sirosh, corporate VP of information management and machine learning at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “For example, we will build R into SQL Server to provide enormously fast and scalable in-database analytics that can be deployed in an enterprise customer’s datacenter, on Azure, or in a hybrid combination.”

Sirosh added that Scalable R analytics will make it “much easier and faster to analyze big data, and to operationalize R code for production applications.”

With the acquisition now complete, Revolution Analytics CEO Dave Rich assumes the post of General Manager of Advanced Analytics at Microsoft. Meanwhile Revolution Analytics’ Chief Community Officer David Smith said the company will continue to develop Mac and Linux versions of its technology.

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