Big Blue is holding the first ever IBM Edge conference this week, and SiliconANGLE is attending. The key areas of focus are storage and big data, two trends that are also be at the heart of the HP Discover gathering that’s being held this week as well.

Today the events are kicking off simultaneously, and although it’s still early there are some safe assumptions that can be made about what IBM has in store for the next few days.  Big data is one field we can look at.

Ahead of Edge the company released an eBook that covers Hadoop and analytics basics, and this morning IBM announced that it’s integrating Platform Computing software with some of its existing solutions. Platform Computing is a maker of cluster management solutions that IBM acquired earlier this year, and its R&D muscle has been invested in enhancing the Symphony grid manager.

“The IBM Platform Symphony family is a grid manager that is now integrated with the MapReduce software framework to provide faster throughput and performance for demanding analytics and big data workloads in a single grid environment,” writes eWeek.

The main advantage the upgraded product offers to customers is making scaling more cost-efficient. More specifically, Symphony is targeting analytics environments – companies have more data to analyze, and Big Blue wants to help them better accommodate their growing data sets.

The company revealed a number of developments in the hardware department as well. The Smarter Computing platform features several new and enhanced products, and Intel – the biggest sponsor of the conference – likely has something up its sleeve as well.

Live streams, executive interviews and analysis from the event will be available at SiliconANGLE.tv.