Consolidation – More to Come

IBM has announced its acquisition of Netezza, a datawarehousing and BI company, for $1.7 billion.

There’s much more to come.

A majority of the human beings are generating machine readable data about themselves. Just check out the mobile penetration numbers and see for yourself. Even in developing countries they’re generating huge trails of data. And while there wont’ be 50 billion phones on the planet, every human being will have access to a mobile phone very soon.

More advanced devices and experiences will generate ever more data.

A majority of human beings in the developed world are generating more machine readable data than ever before. Whereas the Internet has always been social, the relative transaction cost has now come down and blends with a mobile device very nicely. You can use an idle 30 seconds to literally tell the world, in 60 characters, how great your baked potato was.

The sheer amount of data mandates technology that can handle and process big data. Big people are already asking very big questions. Big questions require big data.

Big data is to the 21rst as railroads were to the 19th.

And, comparatively, it’s only 1840.

There’s much more to come.