John Furrier and Dave Vellante are broadcasting live from the HP Discover 2011 conference in San Francisco. The biggest highlight from the gathering is of course Leo’s Apotheker keynote, which encompassed every area on Hewlett-Packard’s priority list, including security in the cloud.

From theCube, our mobile news desk, Furrier and Vellante discussed how new sources of data change consumers’ lives, and represent one of the key technologies that help reshape today’s IT organization’s business model. This data explosion comes with a great deal of security concerns on just about every level – something Apotheker acknowledged in his speech, citing his company’s emphasis on security.

However gimmicky his keynote was, they continued, Apotheker’s message was a very strong one.

Hewlett-Packard is making very serious strides to establish a strong present in the software market, and the company has projects encompassing several key trends including IT-as-a-Service and analytics as well as security. This space in particular was highlighted by one of the execs who sat down at theCube today.

Krishna Sankhavarm, Director of Information Systems Research at the MD Andersen Center, stopped by theCube and detailed how the center processes petabytes worth of medical data used for cancer research (full video below). Sankhavarm has been attending HP Discover for several years now, and noted his interest in some of the offerings that were announced at the conference’s kickoff. These included an upcoming Vertica-powered big data analytics offering demoed during the keynote, and set to launch around Q2 this year.

Deeper into the conference, Michael Calahan, Director of Worldwide Security Production Marking at HP and PrimeLending’s Johnny Hernandez also visited theCube, and discussed how virtualization increases the amount of data security experts can make use of. They also detailed on their take on the outlook of cloud security, forecasting a great deal of improvement compared to the past 10 years.