Dive Brief:

• The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the R Consortium, a group that will work to initiate projects to help the user community make better use of R, a specialized programming language for statistical data analysis.

• The R Consortium includes representatives from Microsoft, Google, HP and several other technology companies.

• The R Consortium will complement the work of the R Foundation, a nonprofit organization that maintains the language.
   

Dive Insight:

Microsoft recently acquired Revolution Analytics, a provider of software and services for the R programming language. The company is now taking a leading role in the newly formed R Consortium, and industry insiders expect it may eventually implement R-as-a-service, which would provide Microsoft users a way to leverage the language in a wide variety of contexts.

The R Consortium will also help the R developer community further extend R via packages and other ancillary software projects.