This document discusses building a scalable data science platform with R. It describes R as a popular statistical programming language with over 2.5 million users. It notes that while R is widely used, its open source nature means it lacks enterprise capabilities for large-scale use. The document then introduces Microsoft R Server as a way to bring enterprise capabilities like scalability, efficiency, and support to R in order to make it suitable for production use on big data problems. It provides examples of using R Server with Hadoop and HDInsight on the Azure cloud to operationalize advanced analytics workflows from data cleaning and modeling to deployment as web services at scale.