• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 23, 2015

Microsoft announced Friday the acquisition of Revolution Analytics, which builds on and contributes to the R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. This acquisition aims to help customers use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platforms in an open-source environment.

As volumes of data continue to grow, the company made the acquisition to help more companies use R and data science to unlock Big Data insights with advanced analytics, Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president, said in a blog post.

Revolution Analytics contributes to open-source R projects such as ParallelR and RHadoop. Microsoft will continue to support and evolve the open-source and commercial distributions of Revolution R across multiple operating systems, including Mac and Linux, the company said.

Microsoft uses and support the R programming language, per David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution Analytics. He believes the combined teams will "help more users use advanced analytics within Microsoft data platform solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud with Microsoft Azure."

Smith said nothing much will change with the acquisition for the company's users. The developers will continue to build on the Revolution R family of products, including non-Windows platforms like Mac and Linux.