What you missed in Big Data: AIs and graph processing rule the agenda

The usual movers and shakers of the analytics ecosystem last week found themselves having to share the limelight with Infosys Ltd., which made headlines by unveiling a machine learning platform for automating common business activities. Mana, as the system is called, can be used to do most of anything from processing payments to answering customer support tickets. The launch comes as part of an ongoing effort from Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka to move his firm beyond merely helping organizations with their application projects to providing the software itself. If successful, the push could improve the outsourcing giant's margins while creating new opportunities for its consulting arm to sell workload implementation services. A similar financial motivation led Oracle Corp. to shell out 663 million last week for Textura Corp, a cloud vendor that specializes in managing the massive amounts of data produced during building projects.