Microsoft is releasing a free developer edition of its Microsoft R Server, an analytics platform for enterprises based on R, the most popular programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics.
The company has been working to integrate R into its big data products since acquiring Revolution Analytics, a provider of R software and services, last year. The announcement this week is part of a rebranding: Revolution R Enterprise for Hadoop, Linux and Teradata will now be known as Microsoft R Server. Revolution R Open is now Microsoft R Open, and is still available as a free download. Windows users will receive Microsoft R Server as part of the SQL Server 2016.
Developers can download Microsoft R Server Developer Edition from Visual Studio Dev Essentials after logging in with a Microsoft account. It contains all the same features as the commercial edition, according to Microsoft, including R Language version 3.2.2 and increased security.
“Advanced and predictive analytics is about developing and testing new models. But it’s also about their incorporation by developers into product deployments of decision support and automation solutions that can benefit the whole organization. With its new offerings for the R ecosystem, Microsoft is playing an important role in bringing analyst modeling and productivity tools as well as deployment tools to a broader audience,” Dan Vesset, a program VP at IDC, said in a statement lauding the news.
Microsoft also plans to integrate Revolution’s scalable R distribution into Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning, and create R Tools for Visual Studio, which will work similarly to Python Tools for Visual Studio.