In a blog post, Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Data Group announced that Revolution R Enterprise for Hadoop, Linux and Teradata is now available as Microsoft R Server with all the benefits of Microsoft’s enterprise-grade quality, support and purchasing options. Microsoft R Server is an analytics platform based on R that is supported, scalable and secure. Microsoft R Server will be available to all students for academic use through the Microsoft DreamSpark programme.
A new Microsoft R Server Developer Edition with all the features of the commercial version will also be available as a free download. Additionally the Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine will include a preinstalled and preconfigured version of Microsoft R Server Developer Edition.
"Delivering Microsoft R Server across multiple platforms allows our enterprise customers to standardise advanced analytics on one core tool, regardless of whether they are using Hadoop (Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR), Linux (Red Hat and SUSE) or Teradata. For Windows, Microsoft R Server will be included in SQL Server 2016 as SQL Server R Services – and the combined bundle is less expensive than Revolution R Enterprise standalone. Until SQL Server 2016 is released, Revolution R Enterprise for Windows remains available as a standalone product," said Sirosh.
Revolution R Open is now Microsoft R Open, and available as a free download. Microsoft R Open enhances the performance of R with multi-threaded processor optimised computations provided by Intel Math Kernel Libraries (MKL) delivering large speedups especially in matrix oriented computations. 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% compatible with all R scripts and packages, and just like R is open source.
Microsoft has been cementing R's leadership in cross-platform analytics for some months. Since the Revolution acquisition, Microsoft has continued to support the community, including expanding the sponsorship of R user groups and conferences. Investment in open source projects for R has also increased, with regular updates to Microsoft R Open and DeployR Open (a server for R deployment via web services), and new and updated R packages including checkpoint, an R package time-machine; ParallelR, for parallel R programming on clusters; and Azure ML, to deploy R functions to the Azure cloud as an API. The company became a founding member of the R Consortium in June 2015.
Additionally, SQL Server R Services, based on Revolution R Enterprise, was launched as a built-in component of SQL Server 2016 CTP3 in October. This provides advanced analytics capabilities integrated within the database. Power BI Desktop further included functionality to visualise and operationalise data in R in November.
“As fellow members of the R Consortium, we’re thrilled to see Microsoft going all-in on support for the R language”, said JJ Allaire, CEO of RStudio in the blog post. “With a first-rate ecosystem of products and companies investing in R, the R language is truly enterprise-ready. We look forward to working with Microsoft on making customers successful with deployment ready, production quality tools and infrastructure.”
"Advanced and predictive analytics is about developing and testing new models. But it's also about their incorporation by developers into production deployments of decision support and automation solutions that can benefit the whole organisation. 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," said Dan Vesset Program VP, Business Analytics and Information Management at IDC in the blog post.
Next steps, said Sirosh, include integrating Revolution’s scalable R distribution into Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning; delivering Microsoft R Server as an Azure Marketplace Virtual Machine and enabling faster development of R models through R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS), with capabilities similar to Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS).
"As part of our commitment to help close the data scientist and analytics skills gap, we will also help educate and train aspiring developers and data scientists who want to learn R by leveraging the breadth and depth of our global programs and partner ecosystem, and with online courses such as Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials," he said.
"Advanced and predictive analytics is about developing and testing new models. But it's also about their incorporation by developers into production deployments of decision support and automation solutions that can benefit the whole organisation. 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," said Dan Vesset Program VP, Business Analytics and Information Management at IDC in the blog post.
Next steps, said Sirosh, include integrating Revolution’s scalable R distribution into Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning; delivering Microsoft R Server as an Azure Marketplace Virtual Machine and enabling faster development of R models through R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS), with capabilities similar to Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS).
"As part of our commitment to help close the data scientist and analytics skills gap, we will also help educate and train aspiring developers and data scientists who want to learn R by leveraging the breadth and depth of our global programs and partner ecosystem, and with online courses such as Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials," he said.
“At Hortonworks, we enable our customers to create modern data applications fueled by actionable intelligence from data in motion and data at rest. The combination of Microsoft’s R Server and our HDP and HDF platforms provides a scalable, enterprise-grade big data analytics solution based on the R language that millions of R developers can embrace for creating rich predictive analytics applications from billions of Internet of Anything data sources in a way that drives transformational value for the business," said Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks.
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January 28, 2016 - Intro to Microsoft R Open by David Smith, Microsoft R Community Lead
February 4, 2016 - Using Microsoft R Server to Address Scalability Issues in R by Derek Norton, Senior Data Scientist Lead, Microsoft
February 11, 2016 - Data Mining with Microsoft R Server by Derek Norton
February 18, 2016 - Best Practices for using Microsoft R Server with Hadoop by Jamie Olson, Senior Data Scientist, Microsoft
February 25, 2016 - Using Microsoft R Server to Operationalize your Analytics by Jamie Olson
Download Microsoft R Server Developer Edition for free.
Download Microsoft R Open for free.
Students can Download Microsoft R Server from DreamSpark for free.
Existing Microsoft MSDN and Volume Licensing users can get Microsoft R Server via MSDN for Windows and other platforms, and via the Microsoft Volume License Service Center.
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