Revolution Analytics (formerly REvolution Computing) is a

statistical software The following is a list of statistical software. Open-source * ADaMSoft – a generalized statistical software with data mining algorithms and methods for data management * ADMB – a software suite for non-linear statistical modeling based on C+ ...

company focused on developing open source and "open-core" versions of the

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

R for enterprise, academic and analytics customers. Revolution Analytics was founded in 2007 as REvolution Computing providing support and services for R in a model similar to

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

's approach with Linux in the 1990s as well as bolt-on additions for parallel processing. In 2009 the company received nine million in

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

along with a

private equity firm A private equity firm or private equity company (often described as a financial sponsor) is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of a Startup company, startup or of an existin ...

and named Norman H. Nie as their new CEO. In 2010 the company announced the name change as well as a change in focus. Their core product, Revolution R, would be offered free to academic users and their commercial software would focus on

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

, large scale multiprocessor (or " high performance") computing, and multi-core functionality.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

announced on January 23, 2015, that they had reached an agreement to

purchase Purchasing is the procurement process a business or organization uses to acquire goods or services to accomplish its goals. Although there are several organizations that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary g ...

Revolution Analytics for an as yet undisclosed amount. In 2021, Microsoft announced they would be retiring their R distribution they acquired from Revolution Analytics. In 2023, Microsoft retired the Microsoft R Application Network, which was a proprietary package hosting service similar to the Comprehensive R Archive Network for packages acquired from Revolution Analytics (like "ScaleR").

Founding and venture capital

REvolution Computing was founded in

New Haven, Connecticut New Haven is a city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 135,081 as determined by the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, New Haven is List ...

in 2007 by Richard Schultz, Martin Schultz, Steve Weston and Kirk Mettler. At the time Martin Schultz was also the Watson Professor of Computer Science at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

. Adding

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

to R allowed the company to net large gains in speed for many common analytics operations and early clients like

Pfizer Pfizer Inc. ( ) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation headquartered at The Spiral (New York City), The Spiral in Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 184 ...

took advantage of REvolution R to see large performance gains using R on computing clusters. While the improvements to core R were released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL), REvolution provides support and services to customers of their commercial product and had considerable early success with life sciences and pharmaceutical companies. A year later the company opened an additional office in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

. In 2009 REvolution Computing accepted nine million dollars in venture capital from Intel and North Bridge Venture Partners, a private equity firm. Intel had previously supported REvolution Computing with venture capital in 2008. A number of Intel employees also joined Revolution Analytics as employees or as advisors. Concurrently, the company changed their name to Revolution Analytics and invited Norman Nie, founder of

SPSS SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Versi ...

, to serve as CEO. This change in management corresponded with a movement toward building a more complete set of software for commercial users; prior to 2009 Revolution had been focused on building parallel processing functionality into the then mostly single threaded R. David Rich replaced Norman Nie as CEO in February 2012.

High performance computing, big data and the shift to analytics

Unlike analytics products offered by

SAS Institute SAS Institute (or SAS, pronounced "sass") is an American multinational developer of analytics and artificial intelligence software based in Cary, North Carolina. SAS develops and markets a suite of analytics software ( also called SAS), which ...

, R does not natively handle datasets larger than main memory. In 2010 Revolution Analytics introduced ScaleR, a package for Revolution R Enterprise designed to handle big data through a high-performance disk-based data store called XDF (not related to IBM's Extensible Data Format) and high performance computing across large clusters. The release of ScaleR marked a push away from consulting and services alone to custom code and a la carte package pricing. ScaleR also works with

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop wa ...

and other distributed file systems and Revolution Analytics has partnered with IBM to further integrate Hadoop into Revolution R. Packages to integrate Hadoop and MapReduce into open source R can also be found on the community package repository, CRAN.

Market position

In comparison to developers of similar analytics tools, Revolution Analytics is a small company; in 2010 the company had a projected revenue of $8–11 million, but no official records of revenue or profit were published in their projections. According to Nie, the increased use of R - a fully fledged programming language, in contrast to other analytics packages - within academia is helping the company to grow quickly. Community vice president David Smith suggested that movement away from "

black box In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The te ...

" analytics toward open source tools in general supported vendors like Revolution over solely proprietary tools.

Products

Revolution Analytics' product Revolution R is available in three editions. Revolution R Open is a free and open source distribution of R with additional features for performance and reproducibility. Revolution R Plus provides technical support and open-source assurance (legal indemnification) subscriptions for Revolution R Open and other open-source components that work with R. (These products were first announced October 15, 2014.) Revolution R Enterprise adds proprietary components to support statistical analysis of

Big Data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

, and is sold as subscriptions for workstations, servers, Hadoop and databases. (Single-user licenses are available free for academic users as well as users competing in

Kaggle Kaggle is a data science competition platform and online community for data science, data scientists and machine learning practitioners under Google LLC. Kaggle enables users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based d ...

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

competitions.) In January 2015 Microsoft rebranded and renewed several Revolution Analytics products and offerings for

Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of Open-source software, open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for Clustered file system, distributed storage and processing of big data usin ...

, Teradata Database,

SUSE Linux openSUSE () is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: ''Tumbleweed'', an upstream rolling release distribution, and ''Leap'', a stable release distribution which is so ...

, and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. Microsoft made several of these R-based products free of charge for developers - these products included: *Microsoft R Server which was previously called ''Revolution R Enterprise for Hadoop, Linux and Teradata'' and included new Microsoft enterprise support and purchasing options. Microsoft R Server was further made available to students through the Microsoft DreamSpark programme. *Microsoft R Server Developer Edition a free version for developers that with a feature set akin to the commercial edition. *Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine an analytics tool developed by the Revolution Analytics division premiered in January 2015. *Microsoft R Open a rebranded version of ''Revolution R Open''.

References

External links

*
Revolutions
', the Revolution Analytics blog *
About page
' for Revolution Analytics *
MRAN
', the distribution site for Revolution R Open
Interview
with Revolution Analytics COO Jeff Erhardt about R, Hadoop and business analytics {{Microsoft Microsoft acquisitions Microsoft subsidiaries R (programming language) Software companies based in California Software companies based in Mountain View, California Defunct software companies of the United States 2007 establishments in Connecticut American companies established in 2007 Companies based in Mountain View, California