The buzz around the upcoming EMC World 2011 is building around the convergence of Cloud and Big Data. As an expected 10,000 customers, partners, press, analysts and so descent on Las Vegas for the four-day event, the theme will highlight these technologies and as in previous events, major announcements are expected.  While some organizations continue and others are early in their adoption to cloud technologies, EMC is positioning themselves as a leader in the exploding value of Big Data, Cloud Technologies and integrating that into their strategic offerings.

The days of EMC as a mere storage company are far, far behind us, nor one that by some observations merely acquired a virtualization company.  That specific acquisition, along with the cumulative sum of continued acquisitions, alliances, integration and development have produced an absolute juggernaut in this business and a unique organization that has no rival.  This event will reinforce that position.  EMC is touting the tools, technology, and opportunity to transform business.

There will be a number of stories to watch here; previously released information also gives us some clues as to some of the further development that can be expected.
Among the stories to watch, the world’s first Data Scientist Summit is expected to be a huge inaugural event.  Data scientist and leaders will converge in a first of its kind thought-share event built around Big Data.  How this meeting of technologies delivers the message to business could very well be paramount to the industry in this day and age.

Expect further announcements on further development and offering on Big Data challenges of today.  In this world of managing and analyzing enormous and constantly growing amounts of data, both structured and unstructured EMC had recently aligned their Greenplum technology with the powerful Hadoop-based Cloudera technology to tackle these challenges.  An announcement around the evolution of this venture could be coming or as some reports say, EMC could be producing their own distinct offering in this space at this event.  Greenplum’s massive parallel processing database is expected to be a major focus.  The ability to use social collaboration and cloud computing techniques for analytics and data warehousing enables the enterprise to have fast, reliable access to this body of information.

EMC is poised to break away with the very mentality of Big Data with a leveraging of their ever-evolving hardware and virtualization technology.  One of their most interesting options is their infrastructure packages known as Vblock.  This high performance, scalable and world class computing platform is a merging of EMC storage, VMWare virtualization and Cisco UCS computing that offer end-to-end completely manageable, flexible, efficient and supportable integrated platform.  The technology literally rolls right into your data center.  After recent discussions with EMC insiders, I will be looking for new offerings of this platform that include but are not limited to new pricing, but expanding options for all sizes of organizations.  A fresh range of Vblock offerings would be a significant advancement in cloud computing platform offering.

Additional recent announcements such as this week’s news of 16 Gigabit FC technology breakthrough will be amongst the technologies that could contribute to the massive technological needs that Big Data entails.  The scale of petabyte-level aggregation, transport, analysis and delivery in Big Data/Cloud constructs demand bleeding-edge technologies on all fronts.  With leading performance options leveraging EMC’s world-class storage, VMWare and their virtualization offerings, and the UCS platform for lightning fast computing, the deck is looking like it is stacked in EMC’s favor.

It is quite obvious that EMC is positioning itself as a leader in the Hadoop-based world of Big Data where they will be able to offer and enjoy constant evolutions in technology.  Those technologies touch on cloud, security, virtualization, management, storage, networking, and on.  The company is focusing the Big Data opportunities for clients and it is certainly an opportunity for them beyond that purpose as well.