2011 has been quite the year for Salesforce.com. We saw the birth of the Social Enterprise at a record-breaking Dreamforce and made forward-looking acquisitions like Radian6, Model Metrics, and Assistly. We even crossed the 100,000 successful customers mark!

But, of all our big announcements this year, the one nearest and dearest to my heart was Data.com. The business data industry may never receive quite the same level of fanfare that social media does, but at the last Cloudforce of 2011 in New York City, cloud-based Data was suddenly on everyone's mind.

Cloudforce NYC had over 10,000 attendees registered and plenty of news on tap, including a "social marketing cloud" featuring Radian6's exciting new social hub and the formal launch of Siteforce. It's been just a few short months since Dreamforce and it's amazing to see companies large and small like Burberry and Blackbird Vineyards talk about their transformation into social enterprises. During the keynote, as Marc Benioff strolled through the audience, Marc stopped to talk with Max Levchin, founder of PayPal and Slide, widely regarded as one of the great visionary entrepreneurs of the 21st century. Marc commented on how Max had been at the forefront of commerce, social and mobile and couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask: "What is the next big thing?"

Max's response took some of us by surprise: "To me, data is the single most exciting form of untapped potential that exists in the enterprise…The shift to the cloud is the fundamental trend that people are starting to understand, it isn't just about not paying for server upgrades anymore, which is awesome, but I think the idea of real-time versus batch processing of data is very powerful."

Of course "the cloud" is nothing new, and our parent Salesforce has been at the forefront of this for 13 years now; but it continuously shocks me how far behind the data industry is in terms of it's own evolution to the cloud. Salesforce launched Data.com with the intent of challenging this antiquated model, just as it has in the enterprise software world.

Validation from a visionary like Max Levchin was a perfect holiday gift for those of us taking on this $6 Billion business data industry.  Anything else catch your eye at Cloudforce NY?