According to Jason Hoffman, CTO/Founder at Joyent, this year’s annual Strata conference may be one of the most important ones to date, and he may just have a point. The 2011 Strata conference, which will take place in February 1-3 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, will focus on the implications of data in everything from data protection to crowdsourcing.

“Big Data is here, and it changes everything. From startups to the Fortune 500, smart companies are betting on data-driven insight. Get control of the new data opportunity at Strata—immerse yourself in three full days of hands-on training, information-rich sessions, and a sponsor pavilion filled with the key players and products.”

The 3-day Strata conference covers pretty much every data trend we’ve seen emerging in 2010. These include distributed data processing, data’s evolution from research to product, Hadoop, training and recruitment of data scientists, augmented interfaces and more. The conference which aims to bring together everyone from start-ups to large ‘smart’ companies is aimed for a broad spectrum of prospective attendees including product managers, developers, CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, data start-up founders and many more.

The discount registration for the event ends at Jan. 6, and the list of sponsors includes big names such as cloudera, EMC, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.  See here for details.