Flipkart on the ‘innovation’ wave; opens up its technology platforms for coders

New Delhi:  Flipkart is the brain child of Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal who did their BTech in Computer Science Engineering from IIT Delhi. Till now, they had been using open source technology that allows users to use source code of an already existing software and build new applications for free. Now, it is hoping to bring about innovation in the e-commerce industry by inviting coders to use its open technology platforms and build new applications.

Until now, only Google and Facebook are known for releasing noteworthy technology products into the open source world. Flipkart, India’s largest online retailer, had opened up its payment gateway ‘PayZippy’ to be used by other businesses earlier this year.

Amod Malviya, Head of Engineering at Flipkart says, “Free use of knowledge and technology is never a loss for a high-thinking entity. While an entrepreneur can benefit from our product and do not have to build everything from scratch, we may also find something innovative and useful coming up which we can use as a consumer.”

Some of the products already released to the open source coders on Goithub are Phantom and HostDB. While HostDB is a tool to help manage data centre inventory, Phantom can automatically queue requests to various servers and create timeouts. Phantom can also route requests to a fallback, if particular service is down.

Flipkart has used Phantom to build its mobile application programming interface and is working on it to develop a platform for sellers too.
This post was written by Aditya Singhal, managing director of askIITians