Microsoft acquisition causes revolution at Yale

Revolution Analytics, a Yale University data science spin-out, has been acquired by tech giant Microsoft for an unspecified sum.

Launched in 2007, Revolution has secured $38.7m in external funding. Intel Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of tech firm Intel, has been a repeat investor in the US-based firm, backing a series A in 2008 for an unspecified amount, and joining North Bridge Venture Partners in 2009 for a $16m series B. The firm held a series C with private backers in 2010 worth $13.4m, and North Bridge returned for a $7.3m round at the start of 2013. Revolution also secured $1.5m in debt financing in 2009.

Revolution is providing software and services based for R, a widely used open-source programming language for computing and predictive analytics. In a blog post, Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president for machine learning at Microsoft, said the acquisition will better enable the firm to provide data insights and advanced analytics to customers.

Sirosh added: “Revolution Analytics provides an enterprise-class platform for the development and deployment of R-based analytic solutions that can scale across large data warehouses and Hadoop systems, and can integrate with enterprise systems. Its Revolution R product line, combined with its expert advisory services and training, help people and companies realize the potential of big data using sound statistical, scientific methodologies. Top customers include some of the world’s largest banks and financial services organizations, pharmaceutical companies, consulting services organizations, manufacturing and technology companies. Revolution Analytics is also an important part of the vibrant R community of over 2 million users worldwide. The company regularly contributes to open source R projects such as ParallelR, and RHadoop, and helps support more than 150 R user groups across the world.”

David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution, also commented on the acquisition: “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. (In 2013, Microsoft open-sourced REEF to provide a big-data analytics framework for YARN.)  The .NET Core is now open-source, providing an alternative developer framework to Java.”