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.

Much of the information is creates in the initial planning stage when a construction company has to draw up blueprints and seek out subcontractors. Textura makes it possible to mine the web for information about each would-be supplier to determine their trustworthiness and find the most competitive bid using standard analytic methods. Oracle hopes that the firm’s services will help offset the slowing revenue growth in its core database business, which is losing ground to the NoSQL crowd.

One of the highest-profiles vendors in the mix is Neo Technology Inc., whose namesake graph store provides the ability to rapidly find relationships among disparate data points. The system became even faster last week thanks to the introduction of a cost-based optimizer that ensures write operations are always carried out in the most efficent manner possible. It’s joined by a new access protocol called Bolt that enables developers interact with their Neo4j deployments much faster than HTTP, according to the startup.

Image via Geralt