The R Programming Language is an open source language tailored to statistics and processing large quantities of data. A company - Revolution Analytics - does commercial development of programming tools.
Last Friday, Microsoft announced that they were purchasing the company - from their blog:
Microsoft to acquire Revolution Analytics to help customers find big data value with advanced statistical analysis
I’m very pleased to announce that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. We are making this acquisition to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics.
As their volumes of data continually grow, organizations of all kinds around the world – financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, research – need powerful analytical models to make data-driven decisions. This requires high performance computation that is “close” to the data, and scales with the business’ needs over time. At the same time, companies need to reduce the data science and analytics skills gap inside their organizations, so more employees can use and benefit from R. This acquisition is part of our effort to address these customer needs.
This will be interesting to follow - we think of Microsoft as a Windows and Office company but they are much much more...