Week in review: Big Data's impact on the world - Enterprise Apps gold rush to the cloud

Big Data is pursuing to bubble up as the topic of choice for the beginning of 2012, even during Davos. Not surprising when one can attest that the cloud computing model is making significant progress all over the planet and even in my home country, France, where skepticism used to be the attitude regarding it. In turn, leveraging the cloud leads to Big Data, in a business context as well, to try to extract from all sorts of data streams meaningful business insights.

Big Data’s Impact in the World
Steve Lohr, in the New York Times, develops some examples in various areas and highlights some interesting numbers.

• Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development - World Economic Report 
• Cloud Computing to reach $270B in 2020 CAGR 30%: Kleiner Perkins said to eye “cloud” fund
• Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity - McKinsey Global Institute Report

I won't come back on Facebook IPO as the entire planet just twitted and blogged about it. But let's step back 5 years ago and remember how people where viewing Facebook back then. It changed big time, Facebook is no longer a youngster phenomena but a business eye opener. Amazing 180° view of the world for a company supposedly going to be valued more than $100B now. Don't you think? We're already in a new world. Social Media is now a reality to most businesses, Marketing cannot ignore it anymore and mobile devices are becoming rapidly the #1 entry point to it. By the way, what is the revenue Facebook is making on mobiles ;-)? (None for now, but stay tuned).

• The Web vs. Mobile Apps: How iOS and Android Are Disrupting The Open Internet 
• Google testing 'next-gen personal communication device'
• Interesting stats: Content Marketing Tactics Now Critical to All Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC] 
• $267B enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy mar­ket: The 3 secrets behind the enterprise tech gold rush 

By the way, recently SAP acquired Successfactors for $3.4B, Salesforce.com did the same with Rypple and Oracle with Taleo for $1.9B and RightNow, check this out. The enterprise apps gold rush seems to be on the cloud.

As Larry Ellison said about cloud computing in 2008: "What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" Not there yet apparently ;-)

So are you ready for Big Data, cloud computing, social networks and mobile internet?