Two key factors come into play regarding enterprise-scale Big Data management and analytics.

FORBES: The Big Cost Of Big Data

"PLM has been perceived as a big, expensive technology akin to an ERP-scale effort, " she says, referring to enterprise resource planning, another alphabet-soup software that tries to unite a company's operations on one computer system.

FORBES: 7 Digital 7

The reason utility computing has stayed on the shelf for the past decade or so is that the tools available to aspiring cloud providers (originally called ASPs, or application service providers) were no different than the tools available to the enterprise at the time: high-performance, scale-up hardware systems that were powerful, but expensive and inflexible.

FORBES: If Cloud Computing Is Here, Then Where Is My Jet Pack?

Well, digging into third-quarter results, the economies of scale one expects in such an enterprise seem slow in coming.

FORBES: Connect

Intended to support both the enterprise and rugged markets, these products are expected to deliver more than 400, 000 random write transactions per second, scale up to more than 5TB of pure solid state storage capacity, ensure enterprise-class drive life endurance, and offered in SAS, SATA, Fibre Channel, and PCIe interfaces.

ENGADGET: BiTMICRO's next-gen SSD controller to deliver blazing speed and big storage in 2012

Fossil fuel activities are done on such a mega-scale with such enormous capital investments that people under 30 can barely appreciate how the enterprise works, let alone make an impact on it.

FORBES: 30 Under 30: Energy

The first successful big data technology was enterprise data warehouses that implement massively parallel processing, scale to the petabytes, handle batch and real-time latencies with equal agility, and provide connectors to structured and unstructured sources.

FORBES: How to Avoid a Hadoop Hangover

Increasingly advanced large-scale M2M applications require advanced service enablement platforms that integrate remote devices, mobile networks and enterprise applications.

FORBES: The Massive M2M Business Opportunity (Part 1)

As the first really big acquisition of an enterprise 2.0 business it also validates the bottom-up sales model which Yammer pioneered on a large scale.

FORBES: Yammer, Microsoft and the Enterprise 2.0 Premium - Deliver Technology People Love