The past year has been a significant one for the cloud industry. Both enterprises and consumers have realized the potential of the technology, and vendors across both sectors have done their best to push as much innovation and marketing into this concept as possible. SiliconANGLE picked the top five cloud stories from this year and rounded them up in a post-holidays special, as we head closer to 2012.

Microsoft and Hadoop

“Cloud Meets Big Data” was the theme at this year’s EMC World 2011, and solution providers are starting to see the appeal. Microsoft is one of the two major vendors that have reached a milestone in this area throughout the past month. The latest version of Azure featured a preview of the Hadoop integration Microsoft has been working on with HortonWorks, now that it has LINQ for HPC.

IBM’s Smarter Cloud

The Big Blue’s analytics initiative spans across several industries and is worth at least as much billions. One of the acquisitions the company made in order to boost the project is DemandTec, a provider of cloud-based analytics that was worth $440 million to IBM.

Cloud Foundry

VMware’s open PaaS is a part of yet another growing trend in IT: the open source cloud. A recent contribution by Tier 3 further solidified the platform’s position in the market, and against Azure.

The Personal Cloud

The consumer cloud has been expanding almost as rapidly as its enterprise counterpart. One of the bigger indicators of this demand in 2011 was Dropbox’s massive $250 million second round of funding.

iCloud  

iCloud earned itself a spot of its own in our list. There have been others before Apple’s and technically speaking it’s not a cloud, but it did manage to live up to a sizable portion of the hype it built up pre-launch – which is a major feat of its own all in all.