To say the last five weeks here at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE have been a whirlwind is an understatement.

In the last five weeks we’ve taken theCube Summer Tour 2011 to five events — Citrix Synergy, EMC World, SAP SAPPHIRE, Dell Storage Forum, and HP Discover. Two of the events, Dell and HP, took place in the same week! With all five events combined, that’s over 100 hours of live broadcasts, hundreds of interviews with technology executives and customers, thousands of frequent flier miles for Dave Vellante and John Furrier, and untold insights into the continually evolving world of IT.

While each event touched on different vendors, use cases and technology developments, a number of common themes did emerge over the course of a month-plus. Here is my quick take on them, with links to tons of related Wikibon and SiliconANGLE content so you can dig even deeper.

As SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier put it at Citrix Synergy, “after all these years in tech where [it] has been this server geeky-thing,” virtualization is finally cool. With IT budgets still strained and IT staffs still lean, companies are eager to create energy efficient, easy-to-mange, flexible data centers via server virtualization and, increasingly, tap desktop virtualization to simplify device management.

At Dell, product specialists like Darren Schmitz are experimenting with Dell technologies and new products from partners like VMware. Speaking live inside theCube at Dell Storage Forum, Schmitz said his latest area of focus is on creating VMware reference architectures for VDI.

At Citrix Synergy, Simon Crosby, CTO at Citrix, described virtualization this way: “Virtualization is really abstracting the user from the physical binding to a technology.”

Crosby said he actually believes virtualizing devices is more transformative than virtualizing servers. “It’s the cloud in your pocket that’s transforming IT much more than just virtualizing the data center,” Crosby said.

Which leads to the topic of cloud computing. At EMC, cloud computing was one of the two main themes. Virtualization serves as the underpinning of cloud computing, in many ways, so the continued maturation of virtualization is gradually leading to the adoption of both public and private clouds, according to EMC execs.

Howard Elias, President and COO of Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services at EMC, talked live inside theCube at EMC World about how EMC is helping customers turn cloud computing from just a concept into a reality through both technological developments and improved service.

Then there’s HP, which is pushing its converged infrastructure approach – bringing together storage, servers and networking into a single offering – to facilitate cloud deployments. Steven Dietch, VP of Solutions and Infrastructure at HP, went inside theCube at HP Discover to discuss HP’s “comprehensive approach” to convergedSteven Dietch, VP of Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure at HP, went inside theCube at HP Discover infrastructure and what it means for cloud computing.

As for on-demand computing, we got a healthy dose at SAPPHIRE in Orlando. SAP’s motto for the show was “on-premise, on-device, on-demand.” The third concept referred to SAP’s determination to deliver its applications via the cloud to SMB customers and enterprises alike. The company released Sales OnDemand, a SaaS-based sales application, during the show, an example of how SAP is embracing cloud computing, said SAP President of Global Solutions Sanjay Poonen.

Of course, a robust, virtualized architecture needs to support something, and more and more that something is Big Data. Big Data refers to the exploding volumes of both structured and unstructured data being created thanks to social networks, machine sensors and other factors. Big Data requires new methods for processing and analyzing data, and EMC and SAP are determined to deliver.

Shortly before EMC World, EMC introduced its own commercial distribution of Hadoop, the Big Data processing framework. During the show, a number of EMC execs went live inside theCube to discuss what the advent of Big Data means for customers. Big Data was the second of EMC’s major themes at the show.

Among the EMC executives to visit theCube was Pat Gelsinger, EMC President and COO, who said EMC is jumping in with both feet when it comes to Big Data, which will allow companies to gain deeper insights into their customers.

SAP, meanwhile, is taking a slightly different approach. At SAPPHIRE, there was a lot of talk about HANA, SAP’s new in-memory data analytics appliance. The goal with HANA, said SAP Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe, is to help customers make sense of large data volumes faster than ever before and simplify their IT environments via in-memory technology.

Not to be outdone, HP was touting its Big Data product, Vertica’s MPP data warehouse. HP acquired Vertica earlier this year and it is sure to play an increasingly important role in HP’s converged infrastructure push.

With so much great content coming out of the five events – Citrix Synergy, EMC World, SAP SAPPHIRE, Dell Storage Forum, and HP Discover — this round-up just scratches the surface of all the great insights we collected inside theCube. You can find all the video interviews on SiliconANGLE.tv, related news coverage on SiliconANGLE.com, and lots of great, deep research from Wikibon analysts at Wikibon.org.