SaaS, Cloud & Social Media: Exploding Data and Applications

SaaS , Cloud and Social Media are exploding. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that growth of SaaS deployments and in the volumes of Cloud and Social Media data is simply staggering.

Over the weekend, I came across a fresh report from Gartner Research on the growth of the SaaS market, another from Aberdeen on data, and a few other recent ones from other places as well.

It's been a while since I wrote about "data explosion", and this weekend reading prompted me to do some.

SaaS Deployments: Through the Roof

Revenue from software as a service will likely reach $12.1 billion in 2011, up 20.7 percent from 2010's tally of $10 billion, research firm Gartner said.

The market should continue to grow at a healthy pace through 2015, when Gartner predicts revenue will hit $21.3 billion.

It's clear that corporations are increasingly less concerned with issues such as security, availability and performance that were once viewed as significant stumbling blocks to the growth of this market. The growth of industry giant Salesforce.com is a testament to this - the multi-billion dollar corporation holds some of the most critical data a company can have: their customer and prospect data.

The explosion of SaaS solutions in the market place has a downside, however.

Businesses had a terribly difficult time integrating their data when it was all inside their own corporate walls. Where they had physical ownership of it. Where it often resided in a database or had a documented API or a documented data structure.

Now it's on some Cloud somewhere. Somebody else has possession of the data. Access to that data may or may not be documented or supported.

Cloud Data Volumes - Out of Control

A recent Aberdeen Group report indicated that organizations are integrating 14 external data sources, up 27% from just a year ago. At that rate, by 2015, it will be 26 external sources and by 2020: 120 sources.

That same report indicated an average 40% growth the data volumes in the past year.

For those of you without a calculator nearby, that means more than an 8-fold increase in the number of external sources, and about a 20-fold increase in data volumes by 2020.

As I wrote in an earlier posting, anyone familiar with managing large volumes of data knows that doubling the amount of data FAR more than doubles the amount of work.

Now MULTIPLY that by the effort required to integrate all these different data sources too.

The WildCard: Social Media

Facebook has what...750 Million users now? There are around 190 million tweets a day (that's up from about 50 million a day 18 months ago). Business are struggling with "what to do" with all this social media data.

It's definitely "another complication". Now we have three: