Era of Big Data

Since the acquisition of DATAllegro from Microsoft in 2008, there are more big decisions this year: EMC bought GreenPlum, IBM bought Netezza, and Oracle upgrades Exadata(interestingly, this is announced by Mark Hurd who joined Oracle as the new president no more than half month). All of these highlight the incoming of the era of big data, and industry's leading companies' strong desire to expand their large data management and business analysis.
Here're several interesting links:
Big Data Means Big Sales
EMC's launches Greenplum appliance

Big data not only comes from the quick expanding web activities we are encountering everyday from facebook, twitter, amazon etc. The traditional industries are also generating huge amount of data every minute with the help of the latest technologies. Sensor and RFID technology has been widely used by giant companies such as walmart, target to help collect data and enable more intelligent supply chain management. And I also went across the following vision:
Sensor Networks Top Social Networks for Big Data

As visioned we're soon entering the Exa- and Zetta-byte age in the next couple of years. The imminent future of big data era calls for more aggressive advances in big data management and sharing, more intelligent and effective business analytics, and the security and privacy primitives associated with all of them.