Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka this week outlined a new open source Big Data initiative, while at the same time pledging to work more closely with Oracle.
Speaking at the Oracle Open World 2014 conference after abruptly leaving SAP earlier this year, Sikka says Infosys will be working closely with Oracle on enhancing the capabilities of the Exadata database appliance and adding extensions to the Java run-time environment that will make it easier to integrate Java with other programming languages.
In addition, Sikka, widely credited with being instrumental in the development of the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform during his tenure at SAP, says Infosys is building an Infosys Information Platform that will aggregate many open source technologies in a way that makes next-generation Big Data technologies simpler to consume.
The goal is to create a data lake where the cost of adding additional applications to the platform is essentially nothing, says Sikka.
Sikka says the next big IT goal is to build a modular approach to creating connected systems that are able to maintain context between networked applications in a way that makes integration simple, while preserving resiliency.
The degree to which Infosys wants to transform the economics of Big Data remains unclear. But at this juncture, it’s already clear that Sikka is placing a major bet on open source technologies to accomplish just that.