Accel Partners has announced that its inaugural Big Data Conference, which promises to “uncover the future disruptive ideas and technology trends in Big Data,” will be held on the Stanford University campus on May 9th. The one-day event will see entrepreneurs, researchers and IT thought leaders converge to discuss how the ability to crunch petabytes of data is transforming the entire services market, from analytics to collaboration to mobile.

The Accel Partners Big Data Conference program, still in development, includes sessions with titles like “Big Data in Production: How Enterprises are Dealing with Big Data,” “Academia: What Big Data Research Will Make the Leap to Industry Next?” and “Cloud Infrastructure: Big Data Building Blocks,” covering a variety of platforms, use-cases and market segments. And, as you may expect, Apache Hadoop will get a spotlight session as attendees discuss the future of the open source big data platform.

SiliconANGLE Network Co-Founder John Furrier said in an e-mail tonight about the news:

When [Accel Partners’] Ping Li and [Cloudera CEO] Mike Olson told me about this a while ago prior to Hadoop World I knew it would be great.  I got the early notice today and signed up in a nanosecond.  Ping and his partners at Accel ,are the best big data VCs in the business.  Mike Olson of Cloudera is one of the most respected entrepreneurs because of his experience and integrity.  He’s one of us…a tech guy with passion who is an entrepreneur who gives back. If it were not for Mike Olson, Amr Awadallah, and their innovative Cloudera Labs program – our SiliconANGLE business would not be what it is today. The old slogan was ‘Go Big or Go Home.’ It should now be ‘Go Big Data or Go Nowhere.

As Furrier says, Accel is deeply invested into the big data marketplace, launching a $100 million fund to invest in the space late in 2011. Big data companies currently in Accel’s portfolio include Couchbase, comScore and, yes, Cloudera. That’s a large investment on Accel’s part, but it’s just a sign of confidence in the growth of big data services – confidence shared by the experts.

“We’ve seen an incredible amount of activity in the Big Data space over the last few years, but I believe we’re just now on the cusp of a tidal wave of innovation that will touch virtually all industries,” said Jeff Kelly, lead Big Data analyst at Wikibon. “There is enough demand and white space in this market – from Big Data business intelligence and data visualization tools to real-time streaming and machine learning-based applications — to accommodate any number of successful start-ups that can transform Big Data’s enormous potential into real-world business value for the enterprise. Within five years, Wikibon expects the Big Data market to surpass the $50 billion mark, and that’s a conservative estimate, in my opinion.”

Services Angle

While the program’s still in development, the time seems ripe for a conference devoted to the transformative power of big data. I think it’s safe to assume that  we will see the major players in the big data ecosystem show up.  A few weeks ago, the Strata conference attracted 5,000 people from throughout the world. And the conference is only in its second year. That shows the level of interest in big data and a sign that there’s plenty of room for a new conference, especially with a group like Accel taking the lead.