The highly anticipated Facebook IPO will have ramifications for all manner of businesses and how they operate. Just as the Google IPO in 2004 changed the search engine business, catapulting search engines into a major marketing driver and changing how companies spend for advertising and evaluate its effectiveness, Facebook’s IPO will confirm the arrival of social networking as a force in business.

Even before the Facebook IPO companies began capitalizing on social business. wiredFINANCE covered it here. The hoopla around the Facebook IPO will intensify the focus on social commerce no matter how the stock does.

The initial kick came last year with a Booz and Company study here. In that study Booz reports that one-third of companies already had a senior executive who is responsible for social media company-wide. Among companies that consider themselves best-in-class the figure jumped to 41%. What will the mega Facebook IPO do? more

After decades of badgering companies to backup their data, many organizations are still only just joining the backup bandwagon. They do it mainly because the auditors or regulators put a gun to their heads.

Over the years, backup and recovery has gotten much simpler and faster due to disk-to-disk (D2D) backup. And continuously falling disk prices combined with deduplication and compression technology has made D2D backup even cheaper.

Now with the advent of backup services readily available in the cloud, yet another backup option is available. A report by Asigra, cloud backup-recovery-restore player, answers commonly asked questions about cloud backup. more

The Federal government has been implementing a cloud computing strategy for the past year. Its goal: drive the government-wide adoption of cost effective, green, and sustainable Federal cloud computing solutions. The government has moved surprisingly fast on this.

Next up is a mobile strategy. That’s probably overdue too, but the mobile technology is only now becoming suitable for serious, large scale general work. (UPS, FedEx have had specialized mobile strategies for years.) The Feds have come up with six core objectives, which we’ll look at below.

Unlike many federal initiatives that seem to either suddenly fall from the sky or spend inordinate amounts of time in committee, this time the Feds are soliciting your ideas and comments from the start. To participate in the discussion, click here. Now let’s look at the six core objectives. more

The business analytics landscape is changing rapidly. The changes are being fueled by the surging interest in Big Data—unstructured data from social networking, smartphones, and sensors and meters of various sorts.

McKinsey addresses the growth of Big Data here. McKinsey’s gurus note that advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional business models. The CFO, in particular, should rethink how the organization handles data analytics.

Ad-hoc querying, multi-dimensional analysis, and data visualization in the past relied on distributed systems running a variety of specialized GUI tools. IBM, however, now suggests a seemingly radical approach and is revamping its analytics offerings. more

The big technology trends in 2012 will be extensions of trends that began in 2011 or earlier. For example, wiredFINANCE noted the Consumerization of IT back in September. Expect it to pick up speed in 2012. Similarly, back in January you read about The Internet of Things here. That too will drive technology trends in 2012.

The top IT research firms publish their trends projections for 2012. You can find Gartner’s here. Maybe more interesting to a CFO will be IDC’s security trends for 2012 here. IDC also breaks out IT trends by market segment, such as retail here and manufacturing here.

The tech trends below are based on the numerous vendor briefings and conferences wiredFINANCE attends as well as talking with dozens of IT and finance managers. Most shouldn’t surprise you if you have been reading wiredFINANCE, but a few might. more