Public cloud adoption is picking up in the enterprise, with evolving business requirements and shadow IT increasingly driving CIOs to extend their infrastructure beyond the firewall. At the center of this revolution is AWS, which is set to reach $4 billion in revenue by the end of this year as business users continue to embrace the on-demand self-service model that established it as a dominant player in the startup scene. TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante drilled down into this trend and discussed Amazon’s vision for the cloud at the company’s recently concluded re:Invent 2013 summit in Las Vegas.

Amazon is going head-to-head against traditional vendors with the goal of turning enterprise IT on its head, moving the majority of mission-critical workloads to the cloud, according to Vellante. Even large companies such as GE and Shell are jumping on the bandwagon in pursuit of agility and efficiency – benefits that Furrier recognized earlier than most.

CrowdSpots, Furrier’s newest startup, offers a Big Data platform that provides insight into social sentiment through a combination of predictive analytics and advanced machine learning algorithms. Originally deployed with HBase in an on-premise Hadoop deployment, the solution was ported to Amazon in order to boost scalability and cut costs. CrowdSpots now tracks 75 million Twitter users and 10 million hashtags across more than 300 verticals, Furrier says, with latencies of less than one second.

AWS evens the playing field for startups and enterprises, Vellante summarizes, freeing up resources for innovation.

“A lot of people say that well, the great thing about AWS is that startups now have the same access to resources that large companies have,” he says. “That’s true, but I’ll make another observation: large companies that have been stuck in the mud because of IT for years also now can tap that innovation. And I think that’s what’s happening, and that’s why this is a trillion dollar opportunity – because it’s not just startups, its anybody.”

Watch the clip below for more details on CrowdSpots, the CrowdChat social engagement app, and the disruptive force that is the public cloud.