Countless tech events took place this year, some more popular than others.  But when it comes to emerging cloud tech, these events are key to building a proper foundation for an entire industry. And these conferences are especially important to everyone, from enterprises to developers, offering the chance to learn the best practices straight from industry leaders. It also encourages networking,  training and marketing to a certain extent.

At SiliconAngle we not only cover, but attend many of the influential events in the cloud space, and our archives are brimming with clips of interviews with industry experts and leaders.  As 2011 comes to an end, we reminisce on this year’s top 5 cloud events:

Hadoop World

If you wish to expand your knowledge on Apache Hadoop, then you should check out Hadoop World. Expert or otherwise, this event will enlighten you on how Hadoop solves big business challenges, while helping you advance your skills. Hadoop users pride themselves in solving real-world business problems within enterprise environments as they build and expand a best practices foundation for Hadoop development, deployment, and management throughout the Hadoop life-cycle. Hadoop experts will be flocking to these events, growing the pool of people to and learn from.  Attendees would be more than glad to tell you about Hadoop and its myriad of projects such as Flume, Hive, Pig and such.

You will also be given the chance to attend Cloudera training classes for managers, scientists, developers and admins. After which, you can complete the Cloudera Certification for Apache Hadoop that you can add to your skills portfolio. Oh, and Doug Cutting, co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project, is usually at Hadoop World. Here are some thoughts from one of editors Kristen Nicole about the event.

VMworld

A leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure event hosted by VMware, VMworld seeks to help IT professionals accelerate success in their enterprises while keeping their investments intact and enable a cloud through 500 breakout and information-sharing sessions, over 20 hands-on lab topics, invaluable networking opportunities, as well as meet over 400 sponsors and exhibitors. The event was be packed with IT innovators, practitioners, executives and technology providers who also wish to explore the leading edge of the industry’s more powerful trend. See here for all the live coverage and analysis from SiliconAngle and Wikibon during this year’s event.  As for the top 10 CEOs that attended the events, here’s the list of their video interviews.

This year’s VMworld opened in Las Vegas with new products designed to ease managing virtual machine technology for enterprise. They also set up new partnerships for companies to find, connect and manage cloud services. VMworld attendees will surely gain insight and opportunities on how to lower cost while reducing complexity and enabling for a more flexible, agile service delivery.  Here’s the wrap session for VMworld 2011.

EMC Breaking Records

A three continent, multi-day series of press, analysts, customer and partner events that highlight record-breaking new innovations and technological achievements resulting from a multi-year investment in the build out of a next-generation storage family. Within these events, attendees were shown some of the industry’s daredevils commissioned by the company to break records in the Guinness Book of World Records, with storage stunts that would impress only a true techie.

Moreover, 41 new storage technologies and products were introduced during the event, naming EMC as one of the major driving forces in the advancement of cloud computing and Big Data applications.  The new EMC VNXe systems are the most simple, efficient and affordable unified storage systems available, if you ask EMC, and are designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses. New high performing versions of Data Domain deduplication storage systems that are 7 times faster than the competition and the new Data Domain Archiver system shatter performance records and redefine enterprises backup, archive and restore information. Here’s an interview with EMC CMO Jeremy Burton on the MegaLaunch in NYC.

HP Project Moonshot

This was a stealth event that turned out to be a major pivot point for HP and ARM. The news of them working on something was leaked the weekend before the Moonshot event. Though the early news was vague, SilcionAngle was in attendance of the Moonshot event to clear up the details. Here’s Forrester analyst Richard Fichera talking about HP Moonshot use cases and more.

HP wants to recreate servers again. Back in the 90’s, HP managed to compact several servers in a space previously allocated for just one server by shrinking some parts, eliminating others, and having them share a single power source. This reinvention is called blade servers and they account for 15 percent of the world’s servers today.

But right now, companies are once more faced with the same problem. They need more powerful chips, more space, more powerful resources, and they have to have them cheap. HP aims to answer the calling by reinventing servers to become smaller and more economic with Moonshot, a big shift from the x86 architecture, which HP calls “Extreme Scale Computing.” It features an ARM-based low energy server technology promoting advances in hyperscale.  Check out all of the interviews we held during the event here.

SAPphire:

An annual SAP User Conference, SAPPHIRE gathers decision makers from global enterprises to meet and formulate solutions that will advance innovation. This year’s SAP events were held in Orlando, Madrid, and Beijing. It’s one of the world’s essential business technology conferences, and the largest SAP customer-run conference. Within the event they unveiled a secret weapon called HANA, an in-computing memory appliance described as flexible, multipurpose and data-source agnostic. It moves critical data into servers to make it instantaneously accessible for processing purposes.

Sapphire was wildly successful with great industry insight, partnerships and opportunities. Here’s an interview with CSC’s Siki Giunta during the event.