A week after the opposing camps of the containerization movement set aside their differences to agree upon a common competitive standard, the much bigger and better-known members of the R ecosystem are repeating history with the establishment of a new joint consortium to help drive the adoption of the statistical programming language.

R is already in use with an estimated two million data scientists and academics around the world, but Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and the other high-profile backers of the working group hope to add several million more as analytics continue to climb the agenda in the enterprise. Redmond has an especially strong interest in seeing that happen given its strategic involvement with the language.

The company’s current position is largely the result of the acquisition of Revolution Analytics Inc., the main commercializer of R, earlier this year in a deal aimed at expanding its reach within the technical community beyond developers to the new generation of professionals who deal not only in code but data as well. The consortium,  and in particular the contributions that its members are set to produce, will promote that goal.

But there’s a much subtler aspect to the initiative that is perhaps no less important in the big picture. Teaming up with half a dozen other vendors – some of which, like Google, are sworn rivals – sends a message that Microsoft and the consortium as a whole are interested in preserving the open nature of R. That too will play a role in convincing more data scientists to come aboard.

That’s especially true given that the responsibly of maintaining and adding new functions to the core language still belongs to an independent foundation in Austria, which adds yet more weight to the consortium’s promise of keeping the community in the driver’s seat. Accordingly, Microsoft and its peers intend to play mainly an auxiliary role as part of their new initiative, albeit a central one.

The brief press release that went out to announce the establishment of the group this morning specified that the members will focus on “user outreach” to help drive adoption, meaning education and training efforts, which Redmond already offers through Revolution Analytics. It’s also mentioned that the consortium will work on  other projects” in conjunction, presumably complementary tools and libraries (which will no doubt be released under an open-source license) meant to to extend the usefulness of R to more applications.

 Photo via Michael Himbeault