The Structure big data conference hosted by GigaOM is underway this week, and many industry insiders have shown up to share their insight or pitch their company’s new offerings.

A sizable portion of those who fall under the former category have also visited theCube on a few occasions during previous events, and we decided to compare their opinion to create a metric of where things stand then, and now.

One of the first on stage at Structure Day 2 is Robin Schumacher, the vice president of products at DataStax who will be lecturing about the five biggest elements for enterprises to consider when setting up their big data initiatives. Another Datastax VP, Ben Werther, attended the Strata conference and sat down for a chat with SiliconANGLE founding editor John Furrier and Wikibon founder Dave Vellante. He talked a bit about the Apache Cassandra distributed data management platform, and how it ties in with Hadoop and his company.

Sanjay Mehta of Splunk took the podium not long after Schumacher, and needless to say, he’s someone we caught up with him as well  at Strata 2012. Splunk is a company that offers search software for the enterprise that’s specifically focused on indexing and contextualizing massive amounts of unstructured data. At the Structure event Mehta is looking at how enterprises can use this tech to tap their untapped resources, and at Strata he explained why this concept gained his firm so much traction.

We’ve interviewed a lot of those who have and are scheduled to make an appearance at GigaOm’s analytics event, as well as many others outside the event. EMC is sponsoring the Structure conference, and SiliconANGLE had a chance to talk with President Pat Gelsinger quite recently.  Marking one of the more interesting Cube sessions  was with  nuclear scientist Dr. Creve Maples, who detailed how he leveraged big data to assist him in his work here.