2011 was a very successful year for a lengthy list of companies, including flash storage solutions maker Fusion-io. Reflecting on 2011, the company outlined three key areas of disruption related to its industry in a blog post late last month.

The first area of growth Fusion highlighted is its own contribution to the flurry of developments that appeared around real-time trends. The demand for real time is increasing on both the consumer end, in the form of speedier web services and content streaming, and among vendors in the form of analytics. Real-time equals performance, and Fusion plays a big role here.

“Aggregate Knowledge and Kontera both outlined how they are able to achieve real time operations for their analytics and advertising platforms by combining MongoDB with Fusion’s ioMemory,” Fusion-io writes.  “We expect to see more of these pairings with other database, data warehousing, and analytics packages in 2012.”

The second major trend Fusion-io is seeing this year is further growth for ‘Small Data’ – analytics databases under 10 terabytes, enough to address most companies’ data warehousing requirements, according to the company.  The flash solutions maker sees a market, and has already established a partnership with at least one vendor to tap this segment with ioDrive.

LAMP spinoffs are the third trend Fusion identified. These newer so-called offsprint stacks are seeing wider adoption among as-a-service providers, and Fusion expects that as they’ll pick up some momentum in the high-performance analytics space, a demand for flash is going to surface.

Fusion looks forward towards the next 12 months after it has reached several sigicant milestones in 2012.  It went public, and introduced several new innovations including ioCache and  Atomic Writes.