Microsoft hasn’t been standing still since it became the new commercial steward of the R programming language by acquiring R specialist Revolution Analytics a year ago. The company has been busy revamping its acquired R offerings, including the open source version.
That free download, along with a free developer edition, highlighted a reorganization and rebranding of Microsoft’s R products, now called Microsoft R Server.
Along with upgrading and maintaining the open source version, Microsoft exec Joseph Sirosh detailed other open source-related initiatives the company has made surrounding R in a blog post yesterday. For example, he noted that Microsoft became a founding member of the R Consortium, formed “to provide support to the R community, the R Foundation and groups and individuals, using, maintaining and distributing R software.” Such moves are furthering Microssoft’s transition from a bastion of proprietary, insular software to a champion of the open source movement.
“Microsoft R Open enhances the performance of R with multi-threaded processor optimized computations provided by Intel Math Kernel Libraries (MKL) delivering large speedups especially in matrix-oriented computations,” Sirosh said. “It also makes it easier to build reliable applications with R on Windows, Mac and Linux by simplifying the management of R package versions. Microsoft R Open is 100 percent compatible with all R scripts and packages, and just like R is open source and free to download, use and share.”
The R language is popular in the Big Data world because of its statistics capabilities and facility for predictive analytics. The new Microsoft platform consists of the acquired company’s offering, Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) for Hadoop, Linux and Teradata – described as a Big Data-capable R distribution for servers, Hadoop clusters and data warehouses – along with Microsoft quality enhancements, support and purchasing options.In another blog post yesterday, David Smith of Revolution Analytics said that, in addition to its new name, “Microsoft R Server includes an updated R engine (R 3.2.2), new fuzzy matching algorithms, the ability to write to databases via ODBC and a streamlined install experience.”
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