Unlike early pioneers SAS and SPSS (now owned by IBM), Revolution Analytics fits the mold of other key new players in the big data world: it supports and sells the commercial version of an open-source product, built and nurtured over many years by a dedicated community of enthusiasts.
Indeed, the two most successful statistical analysis programs, SPSS and SAS, expanded from their domain-specific base (social science for SPSS and bio-medical research for SAS) to become tools used wherever there was data to analyze.