We’ve been streaming live from the 2011 Strata Conference all week, and there were certainly a lot of things going on these past two days.  The first highlight to discuss is the Strata Real World Applications Panel which included of 4 industry experts: Kenneth Cukier, Adam Hurwitz, Jinesh Varia and Mario Veiga Pereira. Each of them discussed how Big Data is affecting their industries, and their take on Big Data.

Stratus Security’s Pete Soderling and BuzzData’s Pete Forde also attended Strata, and discussed the Data Market aspect of the current world of data. The two Petes discussed the changes that needed to be made to establish the benefits of Data Marketplaces, and noted whether or not Data Market as a concept is necessary at all.

We also covered big product launches, including the introduction of the DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra – the first ever enterprise Cassandra applications management, monitoring and operating platform. Social media data provider Gnip was one of the major sponsors and exhibitors at the Strata Conference, and the company announced for the first time its latest Power Track service offering. PowerTrack is a Twitter firehouse feed with 100% filtering criteria matching.

In addition to DataStax and PowerTrack, another cloud company who hasn’t disappointed was CDS maker Clustrix. The company demonstrated its ultra-scalable Clustrix Series 4000 appliances, which can scale clusters to hundreds of nodes.

We’ve been here to cover Strata from every perspective, giving the angle on cloud and big data. Day 2’s keynotes included commentary and presentations by   bit.ly’s Hilary Mason, James Powell from Thomson Reuters, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Microsoft’s Zane Adam.  But the real goodies were our post-keynote interviews at theCUBE, where even Tim O’Reilly himself stopped by.  Check the archives here.