Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the Big Data and enterprise IT industries:

Strata Conference

This week started with the 2011 Strata Conference in New York.  This year’s conference has given us insight into the world of big data and how big data will shape the future of business in terms of timelines, decision making, and insights.  The conference’s main segment “Making Data Work” was focused as how to make big data work from gathering, cleaning, analyzing to storing data, communicating data intelligence effectively using latest tools and technologies available.

Social Networks Updates

Buddy Media launched a new social marketing tool called ConversionBuddy that will endow social network providers to build and maintain real-time relationships with consumers.  This tool will provide a clearer picture of marketing trends, to find out which content and features are popular and which social networks have the highest revenue opportunities.  This will enable companies to work on qualitative data to help create, manage and track social campaigns on Facebook.

Twitter revealed its big data streaming solution, Storm as an open source tool at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis this week.  The distributed computing system solution is used to distribute data to be processed over a cluster of commodity hardware. This new entrant showcased the rise of distributed computing system along with Apache Hadoop and HPCC from LexisNexis.

Partnerships, Acquisitions and Funding

There’s an upswing for big data startups that are raising funds for their business growth, and this week is no exception.  Opera Solutions has raised $84 million to concentrate on product development. Opera, maker of the mobile browser, has acquired an independent Android app store company, Handster.  With this acquisition, Opera is transforming itself from a browser company into a fully integrated mobile services company.

More news this week from acquisition front, SAP has acquired Crossgate, the company that offers hosted business-to-business integration services. The deal enables SAP to integrate their network of existing applications and solutions that offer innovative technologies and capabilities with other partners.

ScaleMP, the virtualization solution provider, announced a partnership with AMD this week. With this partnership, ScaleMP will integrate its virtualization solutions to run on AMD architecture.  AMD machines provide more memory slots than competitors, and allow users to pool up to 64TB of RAM, which in turn would enable big data providers like ScaleMP to deliver high performance computing with lower costs.

Product Launch

Here is an update from Hitachi’s product launch this week. The company has chosen HP’s SSDs for their storage array to launch 3PAR F-Class, T-Class and P10000 V-Class systems, which will ship with 3.5-inch Fibre Channel Ultrastar SLC-based solid state drives, for OEMs.

DataDirect Networks has also launched a new high performance and scalable big data storage appliance, the Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) 10K-X.  The appliance supports up to 1200 drives in one system, can boost read-write speed around 15GB/sec and uses SDD to deliver 849K+ I/O per second.  The addition of the newest data storage update will further intensify DataDirect’s approach of optimizing its solutions for big data and cloud deployments.