The cloud and big data are on a collision course, and that’s exactly what EMC World 2011 was all about. Open-source is a particularly hot topic these days, and alongside all the Greenplum developments and Hadoop launches, Rackspace has been benefiting from this accelerating market.

The managed hosting provider has a very firm position in the open-source cloud standards space thanks to OpenStack, and the company’s successful ventures reflected fairly well in its earnings call this week. Revenue for the first quarter of 2011 was $230 million, and annual growth is expected to exceed last year’s 24 percent.

In addition to open-source, one topic that caught the eyes of EMC and others is the datacenter energy consumption issue. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects data center energy usage to double over the course of the next five years, which is one of the reasons many companies are taking action.

This week, the Google I/O conference also provided quite a bit of news and updates. In addition to the launch of the Honeycomb-ready Springpad version, LucidlChart also had a launch of its own. LucidChart is an HTML5-based collaborative visual communication and diagramming app, that now offers users full offline functionality, as well as real-time collaboration.

At its event, Google had another piece of big news. The internet search giant launched a cloud-based music storage and streaming service –similar to that of Amazon and iTunes. Users can upload their music to the Google music cloud and share the files among their devices, though Google will not offer music like its competitors. This means that it won’t have to tackle label rights – something Amazon has difficulties in for its Cloud Drive service – but it also leaves the question of how Google plans on monetizing its new offering wide open.