One of the hottest trends so far this year is Big Data. What is Big Data? There are many definitions, but to most, its all that application transaction data sitting in a big database taking up storage capacity. What seems overwhelming, is actually statistics that tells the story of your company and customers. There are more and more solutions entering the market that give enterprises big and small the tools to extract meaningful information from all this data, because after all, Big Data means Big Opportunity.

With these four business applications, all integrated, you can easily streamline your customer on-boarding process -- post sales. Leveraging a customer success monitoring solution like Totango, triggering emails and marketing automation with Marketo, customer training portals by KeyStone OnDemand, and social media engagement with HootSuite. These solutions tie it all together and will drive renewals to a whole new level.

NetProspex, a provider of verified, crowd-sourced business contact data services has announced the availability of its Data Cloud API (application programming interface), a set of developer tools providing real-time access to millions of crowd-sourced business contacts validated by proprietary CleneStep™ verification.

Here is a great article from TechCrunch that is worth a read. Gone are the days of rolling out CRM across your organization and turning to multiple vendors for integration, lead lists, and marketing automation. Today vendors like Salesforce are providing and all-in-one, taking CRM to a new level. With the acquisition of companies like Radian6, Jigsaw, Salesforce's platform comes stacked and ready to generate and manage business.

Marketing online and via social media channels can bring great success online as well as offline. Brick and Mortars are finally leveraging what social can bring, but are they taking a hard look at online promotion and what marketing automation can bring to their businesses? This infographic by KISSmetrics goes deeper.

There are a number of excellent legal applications delivered in the cloud. Lawyers would seem like early adopters of these technologies -- here's a brief snapshot by LawyerTechReview.com detailing how lawyers are using technologies.

Apptio, a provider of Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions has raised $50 million in a Series D funding round. T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. led the round and were also joined by existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures. The new round of capital will be used to further invest in the development of the company's TBM platform, expand market penetration, drive customer success, and maintain its independence as the industry's trusted provider of TBM solutions. The Series D round brings the total amount raised by Apptio to $91 million.

If you are looking for the best integration solutions around, head down to Cloudforce happening in San Francisco this week. You will get to meet the leaders in person. This list details the 5 integration companies attending this year's Cloudforce event.

I know, I know, I know... How can SAP be social? They are not a social company by any means, but with all the right partnerships and integrations any piece of software can be social. 

uptime software, Inc., has released uptimeCloud, the only real-time cloud cost monitoring software as a service (SaaS) tool on the market.