Armando Escalante, former CTO and senior VP at LexisNexis Risk Solutions who went on to head the big data arm of the same company, HPCC Systems, has moved across the big data board to land at predictive analytics startup, Opera Solutions.

Opera Solutions has been finding new inroads with its Vektor analytics and processing platform, which has propelled their big data approach—one that has resonated well with investors.

While the company has been rather mum about who some of their superstar customers are, they have touted their solutions as central to customers in a number of industries, including big retail and financial services.

In his new role as Chief Operations Officer at Opera Solutions, Escalante will oversee technology and platform development, product development, and lead core initiatives within Opera, including work with their data management capabilities, data science and, as a release today described, “the development and management of organizational infrastructure, processes and IT.

Escalante had been the voice of the HPCC Systems big data platform since its much-talked-about public release, which many suggested could vie with the success of Hadoop. He says that he took on his new role at Opera Solutions because of its approach to predictive analytics, which he says is a “breakthrough way to meet a fast-growing need in the market to use big data to drive productivity and profitability.”

According to Escalante, the goal during his tenure will be to bring the science behind Opera Solutions into a reality that businesses can readily tap.

One can assume that his 20 years of technology business expertise will serve him well at the top of an up-and-coming company that is still finding its path on one already cluttered with numerous similar offerings. Escalante has held senior positions at Bell Labs, EPSON America, and Unisys, among others and is somehow finding time to pursue his PhD in Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University.

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