There are two weeks left in 2020, which means it’s time to exhale a bit and see where we’ve gone. It’s been a bumpy ride over the previous 50 weeks, for sure. But big strides have also been made for those pursuing big data, advanced analytics, and AI, and those accomplishments deserve some credit.

The big story of 2020, of course, was COVID-19. …The other major story of the year was the rise of the public cloud. The cloud was already growing fast at the beginning of 2020–and then COVID-19 happened and cloud growth kicked into overdrive. AWS grew at a 33% rate in the first quarter ended March 31, Google Cloud at 34%, and Microsoft Azure at a whopping 59%. Amazon.com, meanwhile, went on a hiring binge, bolstering its employee rolls by 380,000 over the past year. Collectively, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google their collective market capitalizations from $3.07 trillion to $4.43 trillion since December 30, 2019. (Apple, which does not run its own cloud, grew its market cap by nearly a trillion dollars.) Read More