Revolution Analytics is an American company, a manufacturer of statistical processing software , focused on the commercialization of the R programming language and the creation of software solutions using it [2] .
| Revolution analytics | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type of | Private company |
| Base | 2007 |
| Abolished | 2015 |
| Reason for Abolition | Absorbed by Microsoft |
| Former names | REvolution Computing |
| Location |  USA : Palo Alto |
| Key figures | Richard Schulz, co-founder Norman Nye , Product Advisor, Dave Rich, CEO |
| Industry | software development ( ISIC :6201 ) |
| Products | Revolution r |
| Number of employees | 55 (2013) [1] |
| Site | revolutionanalytics.com |
Founded in 2007 , in 2009 received funding from the Intel Investment Fund and the Norman H. Nie Private Fund, who became the CEO of the company; Since 2012, the CEO is Dave Rich. In January 2015, acquired by Microsoft .
The main product of the company - Revolution R - is a high-performance version of the R language runtime optimized for multi-threaded computing and a series of libraries, primarily for mass-parallel processing within the framework of the concept of " big data " [3] [4] .
Content
History
Based in New Haven , Connecticut in 2007 under the name REvolution Computing, as a result of the separation of an independent business unit from the Department of Information Technology at Yale University [5] [6] , Richard Schulz led the company. The company initially focused on optimizing the runtime of the R programming language under conditions of a high level of parallelism ; Pfizer was one of the first customers to launch R assembly from REvolution Computing in a highly clustered environment [7] . The company released the optimization of the core of a programming language under a free GPL license , the company received revenue under technical support contracts; the main customers are pharmaceutical and biotechnological enterprises [8] [9] . A year after its founding, the company opened an additional office in Seattle and received investments from Intel Capital .
In January 2009, the company received $ 9 million from Intel Capital in partnership with North Bridge Venture Partners, Norman Nye, the founder of SPSS , who took over as CEO of the company, as part of the second round of venture capital investments . Also, several Intel employees began to work constantly in the company as consultants [7] [10] [11] . The change of name to Revolution Analytics also dates back to the same time.
If, until 2009, the main work was devoted to expanding the computing capabilities of distributed processing, while for each instance of the runtime environment R remained mostly single-threaded, with the change of management, the main efforts of the developers were aimed at optimizing multi-threaded processing for multi-core processors [4] .
In February 2012, Norman Nye resigned as CEO, remaining in the position of product adviser and member of the board of directors. Dave Rich, a native of Accenture, was invited to lead the company.
On January 23, 2015, the company was acquired by Microsoft, the deal was not disclosed, it was reported that Microsoft plans to use the assets of Revolution Analytics to develop machine learning services on the Azure platform [13] .
Revolution R
Revolution R - the main product of the company, is a distribution of the R programming language and optimized for multi-processor processing and work with large volumes of the runtime. Standard R distributions, in contrast to the common commercial statistical processing environments, for example, manufactured by SAS Institute and SPSS , operate with all sets of directly processed data in RAM. The RevoScaleR package allows you to work with data arrays on hard drives and provides mass-parallel processing in the conditions of data distribution among nodes of a computing cluster [3] . With the advent of RevoScaleR, the company began selling software according to the licensed model [14] , whereas previously all the development was distributed freely under the GPL, and the company received revenue only from technical support. RevoScaleR works with Apache Hadoop and some other distributed file systems; integration with Hadoop was carried out in partnership with manufacturers of Hadoop distributions - Cloudera , IBM ( ), Intel and [1] [15] , with In this, the company posted the main integration packages with Hadoop and MapReduce in the public repository of the R - CRAN language [16] . Also, together with IBM, a project was implemented that provides the ability to work in the R language with databases managed by Netezza hardware and software systems [17] .
Single user (server) and server licenses are delivered. Single-user licenses for users of academic institutions are free [18] [19] .
Competition
The main competitors of the company in the market of statistical processing platform software were considered IBM (primarily due to the takeover of SPSS ) and SAS Institute ), despite the fact that the financial performance of Revolution Analytics is several orders of magnitude lower than that of its competitors (annual turnover estimate from 2010 - from $ 8 to $ 11 million [20] ). The potential competitive advantage was the popularity of the R language in the research environment (higher than that of the built-in languages of the SPSS and SAS tools) [21] and wider possibilities for expanding and flexible programming due to the high expressiveness of R [22] [23] [24 ] ] . In addition, the company was able to provide significant competition to SAS in terms of price parameters [25] [26] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Larry Dignan. Revolution Analytics lines up Hortonworks, Intel Hadoop pacts . Revolution Analytics competes with legacy analytics players such as SAS. By forging a host of Hadoop partnerships, Revolution Analytics is aiming to be a front-end platform for the big data wave. (eng.) . ZDNet (February 26, 2013) . Date of treatment March 8, 2015.
- ↑ Blankenhorn, Dana Revolution rebooting R with name change and new strategy . ZDNet . Date of treatment November 10, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ 1 2 Gardner, Dana Revolution Analytics targets R language, platform at growing need to handle 'big data' crunching challenges unspecified . ZDNet (August 4, 2010). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ 1 2 Prickett Morgan, Timothy Open source R in commercial Revolution . The Register (May 6, 2010). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Bogdon, Steve One-on-One with David Smith . Dashboard Insight (January 18, 2011). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Leidel, John Revolution Analytics Defines The Future of R-Statistics . InsideHPC . Date of treatment 2011-11-109. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ 1 2 Shankland, Stephen Intel open-source expert heads to start-up . CNet . CBS Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Vance, Ashlee . R You Ready for R? , The New York Times (January 8, 2009). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Davies, Kevin . The New England Computing Revolution ( Bio-IT World Magazine (July 14, 2008). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Rao, Leena REvolution Computing Raises $ 9 Million . TechCrunch (October 20, 2009). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Higginbotham, Stacey . The Data Whisperer: Norman Nie of Revolution Analytics (English) , The New York Times (February 2, 2011). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Tarran, Brian Rich replaces Nie as Revolution Analytics CEO . Research. (February 3, 2012). Date of treatment November 15, 2012. Archived November 23, 2012.
- ↑ Derrick Harris. Microsoft buys data science specialist Revolution Analytics . Gigaom (23 January 2015). Date of treatment March 8, 2015.
- ↑ Morgan, Timothy Prickett . Revolution lets R to stats on big data (English) , The Register (August 3, 2010). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Rosenberg, Dave Open-source 'R' gets Hadoop integration . CNet . CBS Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived February 17, 2012.
- ↑ Brown, Christopher Package: mapReduce . CRAN The R Project. Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Harris, Derrick . IBM Creates Big Data Frankenstein With Netezza-R Fusion (Eng.) , The New York Times (2011-03-141). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Free single user subscription to Revolution R Enterprise . Revolution Analytics. Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Finley, Klint Revolution Analytics Offers Free Software for Kaggle Competitors . ReadWriteWeb (January 4, 2011). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Xavier, Jon . Revolution Analytics wants to overthrow old statistical tools ( Silicon Valley Business Journal (August 15, 2010). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Hardy, Quentin . Power in the Numbers , Forbes (May 24, 2010). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ McNally, Steve Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software . Forbes Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Olds, Dan 'R' is for Revolution Analytics . The Register (March 22, 2011). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Vance, Ashlee . Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power , The New York Times (January 6, 2009). Date of treatment November 19, 2011.
- ↑ Hardy, Quentin Another Open Source Swipe at IBM and SAS . Forbes (February 1, 2011). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
- ↑ Bodkin, Ron Revolution Analytics - Commercializing R for Statistics . InfoQ (February 2, 2011). Date of treatment November 19, 2011. Archived on September 4, 2012.
Links
- revolutionanalytics.com - official website of Revolution Analytics