With a working theme “Cloud Meets Big Data”, the first day of EMC World 2011 was a hit. The four-day customer and partner event kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas where some 10,000 attendees grazed the biggest-ever EMC World with 500 educational sessions, 100 hands-on labs and tons of exhibits from top IT companies. Talks will be given by the most influential leaders in the industry and EMC’s very own lineup of executives. John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com and Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org are there to witness every milestone and interview some famous personalities of the occasion. The dynamic duo has given their fruitful thoughts on EMC and Hadoop as they welcome viewers and readers at this affair.

Opening the much-awaited gathering is the CEO of EMC, Joe Tucci. The head overtly expressed his confidence on open source and stated that Hadoop and Greenplum would not be their last investment in that field. He said, “It is a way to make sure I have that embracing of open source from a place in EMC that is very committed to it and it is also commitment from me going down that we are going to reach out and do more with open source.” This was almost the same tune that Tucci hummed with The Cube in the same event last year in Boston. Together with VCE CEO Michael Capellas, he talked about the future of the organization, VMware, advice for startups and young ones and some baseball stories.

Tucci also pointed out that while there will be an estimated 47% boost in IT jobs until 2020, the main focus of the tech community is still the Big Data, which later on were translated to figures: 300 quadrillion files by the end of 2011.

Following Tucci’s keynotes is President & COO Pat Gelsinger’s session on the transformation of IT to cloud computing and the journey in between. He also unveiled the “Project Lightning” that just struck the crowd.

Other notable speakers that made a stopover at The Cube include Tom Clancy (VP of Education Services of EMC) who touched on cloud certifications, Tom Roloff (EVP EMC Consulting) who gave his piece on Big Data and cloud solutions.

With faces from various companies like Emulex, Cisco, HCL and Strickland Consulting still on queue, EMC World 2011 is set to define the designing, building and operating advanced IT environments.