Microsoft buys Revolution Analytics
Microsoft buys Revolution Analytics - I look at why this is both surprising and not.
By Gregory Piatetsky,
@kdnuggets, Jan 24, 2015.
I was both surprised and not surprised to learn that
Microsoft will acquire Revolution Analytics.
Smaller stand-alone analytics vendors find it increasingly hard to compete, and several have been acquired (SAP bought KXEN, Dell bought Statistica, ...), so Revolution Analytics acquisition is not a surprise.
I was surprised that Microsoft was the buyer, since Revolution Analytics is an open-source company.
However, David Smith (Revolution Analytics Chief Community Officer) explained in his post (Revolution Analytics joins Microsoft)
Also, Microsoft has become a big user of R - for its Xbox gaming and especially Microsoft Azure Machine Learning platform. So perhaps this acquisition does make a lot of sense.
Congratulations to Revolution Analytics team which will continue to support and develop the Revolution R family of products - including non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux. The free Revolution R Open project will continue to enhance open source R.
There are only a few standalone analytics vendors left, so watch out for more acquisitions.
I was both surprised and not surprised to learn that
Microsoft will acquire Revolution Analytics.
Smaller stand-alone analytics vendors find it increasingly hard to compete, and several have been acquired (SAP bought KXEN, Dell bought Statistica, ...), so Revolution Analytics acquisition is not a surprise.
I was surprised that Microsoft was the buyer, since Revolution Analytics is an open-source company.
However, David Smith (Revolution Analytics Chief Community Officer) explained in his post (Revolution Analytics joins Microsoft)
Microsoft might seem like a strange bedfellow for an open-source company, but the company continues to make great strides in the open-source arena recently. Microsoft has embraced Linux as a fully-supported operating system on its Azure cloud service. (CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed "Microsoft loves Linux" in foot-high letters at a press event back in October.) Microsoft supports Hadoop with Azure HDInsight and has partnered with Hortonworks to extend open-source Hadoop for the enterprise.
Also, Microsoft has become a big user of R - for its Xbox gaming and especially Microsoft Azure Machine Learning platform. So perhaps this acquisition does make a lot of sense.
Congratulations to Revolution Analytics team which will continue to support and develop the Revolution R family of products - including non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux. The free Revolution R Open project will continue to enhance open source R.
There are only a few standalone analytics vendors left, so watch out for more acquisitions.
