Today EMC World 2012 is kicking off with all the expected fanfare.  The storage giant’s annual gathering that has a history of aiming towards, and usually hitting, the dead center of what happens to be going on in the IT industry at the time.

Last year’s the slogan was “Cloud Meets Big Data.” The partners attending the event managed to a release a slew of announcements during the five-day event, which in turn revved up with EMC’s own news. The storage giant debuted literally dozens of new products, and not surprisingly a sizable portion address big data.

Greenplum was and still is a core element in EMC’s analytics strategy, alongside the open-source Hado.  A Greenplum-powered software appliance was debuted in a commercial and a freely downloadable community edition, while at the same time members of  the company’s ecosystem unveiled a few Hadoop solutions of their own:  DataStax released the Cassandra–based Brisk, EMC rival NetApp announced a big data appliance, and a few others launched their new products as well.  On top of all that, a big portion of the event itself – that is the workshops, sessions and the rest of the bundle – was dedicated to the same sector.

This year, it seems that the cloud and big data are still very much in demand. The second megalaunch is dubbed with “The Rise of Planet Data” and security pertaining to EMC’s cloud approach will be an equally significant highlight.

“You can’t really get into a conversation about cloud without getting into a conversation about security,” said Jeremy Burton, the storage vendor’s chief marketing officer. “And, without trust in the cloud, it’s my belief, that there is no cloud.”

TheCube will be streaming live coverage and analysis throughout the entire event, starting today through May 24. Expect updates as they happen via SiliconANGLE.tv.