Microsoft announced that it has agreed to acquire Revolution Analytics, which provides software and services for statistical computing and predictive analytics programming language “R”. Microsoft says it will use the acquisition to help companies take advantage of R and data science.

The company intends to help reduce the data science and analytics skills gap in organizations in the financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, and research spaces, and this acquisition will help them attempt to do that.

“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,” says Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of Machine Learning at Microsoft. “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.”

Customers will be able to use analytics within Microsoft’s data platforms on-premises, in hybrid cloud environments and on Microsoft Azure, the company says.

“By leveraging Revolution Analytics technology and services, we will empower enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale,” says Sirosh. “Additionally, we are excited to help foster the open source evolution of R and, particularly, the community of people that drives that evolution.”

Microsoft will support and evolve open source and commercial distributions of Revolution R for various operating systems.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Revolution Chief Community Officer David Smith discusses the acquisition further here.