Big-data analytics company Databricks Inc. is teaming up with RStudio Inc. in order to help developers write code for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications more easily using the R programming language.

The partnership entails integrating Databricks’ popular Unified Analytics Platform with the RStudio Server, which is a development environment for programmers working with R.

The R language is one of the most popular programming languages used by data analysts and data scientists to build sophisticated statistical models, which can be used in machine learning projects, thanks in part to the vastness of its package ecosystem. Indeed, many of the most popular machine learning algorithms have already been implemented in R. Meanwhile, Databricks’ Unified Data Platform is built atop of the Apache Spark big data processing framework, which has become one of the top open-source runtime environments for machine learning and stream computing and is at the heart of many companies’ push into big data and artificial intelligence.

The integration with Databricks’ platform is simply meant to make data scientists lives easier by allowing them to access RStudio from within the Unified Analytics Platform. That’s useful because Databricks’ platform makes it easier to unify data processing with AI technologies, thereby making it simpler to create AI-powered applications, the companies said.

Another key benefit of the integration is it will provide R users with easier access to large data sets, as Databricks can process, clean, blend and join large sets of data ready for statistical analysis in R.

“RStudio and Databricks have played significant industry roles in commercializing R and Spark, respectively, so this partnership should be welcomed by working data scientists trying to use their existing skills to build and train sophisticated AI for deployment into business applications,” said James Kobielus, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE.

Still, Kobielus did point out that the partnership doesn’t really bring anything new to the table for those who aren’t exclusive Databricks users, since other companies have already been supporting R programming in Spark for several years already. “For example, IBM has been providing access from its Data Science Experience tool to open-source tools and libraries, including Spark and R, for the past two years,” he said.

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