Apica, a Stockholm and California based load testing and performance monitoring provider, has introduced ApicaLoadTest.com, a new load testing portal that brings together the tools, premium load generation testing networks, and professional experts to initiate on-demand cloud, mobile, and enterprise load tests for up to 2 million concurrent users.

Software testing along with other domains has seen considerable change with arrival of SaaS delivery, mobile, agile development and other parameters last few years. We had been writing quite a bit on testing software and what we ourselves learnt during the change. So here are 20 selected posts from the lot published this year as a quick recap with thanks to the amazing testing community who have supported and kept us going.

Last year this time we have been talking about big data not as a matured concept and very few number of big data software being trailed in beta versions based on Hadoop. It was early January of 2012 that Apache has announced general availability of Hadoop v1.0. Since then variety of startups, solutions have been launched both opensource and commercial. 2012 was the making of big data and towards the end of it, investors have gone on full force investing in both big data processing and analytics solutions heavily. Organizations securing those investments will in 2013 will go all out to take big data to the next maturity level.

With growing data comes bigger challenges to manage such data and specifically when an enterprise architecture involves moving data across various stores, involves wide variety of data to be processed and requires distributed scalable processing. Amazon has just the right solution in AWS Data Pipeline announced on its blog this month.

While this year has seen tremendous growth in world of enterprises with infinite variety next few years poses a challenge to control and govern the volumes of data specifically where regulation of data takes utmost priority. IBM is gearing up to that challenge and has acquired StoredIQ, an application that allows companies to identify, analyze, and act on dynamic data to meet their eDiscovery, information governance, and data management requirements.

Not long ago Citrix has acquired Podio, a much liked collaboration platform that enables people to work the way they want to, cut down on email and free themselves from content chaos. This European collaboration software company managed to raise just about $4.6 million before it was acquired by Citrix for almost a whooping $53 million back in April 2012.

The combined emergence of SaaS, Mobile and a wide range of tools and services are leaving no choice for enterprises to have a single solution but instead architect a variety of combination of solutions working together with each other.

The nanophotonics, the study of behaviour of light at a nanometer scale and its use to resolve mysteries of big data is here. Thanks to the researchers at IBM, the tremendous year to big data is coming to an end with a bang with a new technology called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics enabled for commercial use.

Oracle has been on a roll through the year acquiring SaaS based solutions and has announced yet another acquisition in DataRaker, a provider of a cloud-based analytics platform that enables electric, gas and water utilities to leverage vast amounts of data to optimize operational efficiency and improve the customer experience.

Big data this year has seen tremendous growth and significant investment in relevant startups and established players alike. GigaSpaces, a provider of application virtualization platforms has conducted a survey which revelas some very informative insights on big data and what enterprises are doing and planning to do in coming years.