Real example: improve accuracy, reduce training times for existing R codebase

When you buy an item on a favored website, does the site show you pictures of what others have bought? Retailers have been building such systems for years, many built using the programming language R. For older implementations of recommender systems, it's time to consider improving performance and scalability by moving these systems to the cloud --the Azure cloud. Recently, we were asked to help a customer improve the performance and process surrounding the R implementation of their recommender solution and host the model in Azure. Many of their early analytic products were built in R, and they wanted to preserve that investment. After a review of their solution, we identified bottlenecks that could be vanquished.