Next week is the Strata Conference, one of our favorite events showcasing the latest trends in data science.  Kicking off next Tuesday, Strata runs through Feb 26 – 28 in Santa Clara, CA.  We’ll be there, broadcasting live from the event with our mobile news desk, theCube.

Last year was particularly interesting, offering a great deal of insight to the Big Data tools that were making their way into the enterprise.  This year, the world seems all the more ready for Big Data deployments, so we’ll be on the lookout for more specifics around Hadoop implementation, cloud operations and emerging security trends.

So what can we expect from Strata 2013?

The Cloud Angle

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Cloud and analytics are converging.  Big Data applications require high scalability to accommodate rapid workload growth, and the public cloud offers a cheap and convenient means of keeping up with the rapid pace of technology.

On day one of Strata, Amazon’s Karan Bhatia and Parviz Deyhim will be holding a hands-on session aimed at instructing participants on the tprocess of setting up Hadoop in the AWS cloud. A few hours later, three Google engineers will take the podium to talk about App Engine and how it too can be leveraged as an end-to-end analytics solution.

Python and R

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Python is picking up traction among data scientists. Earlier this month Continuum Analytics raised $3 million from DARPA to develop free Big Data tools for Python users, and next week two pundits will take to the stage in an attempt to highlight the advantages of the language in the Big Data context. Physicist Brian Granger of Cal Poly State University and DataPad’s Wes McKinney, author of the upcoming book Python for Data Analysis, have laid out the agenda here and here.

Unlike Python, R language is already hugely popular among data scientists. Garrett Grolemud of RSTudio will be hosting a course on Hadley Wickham’s R packages on Tuesday.

Spark and Shark

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We also expect to hear more from those pushing out Hadoop distributions, as this Big Data framework gains support as an enterprise-ready ecosystem.  Spark is cluster computing system that is fully compatible with Hadoop and can outperform it by up to 100x. Shark is a Hive competitor that is also one hundred times faster than the competitor.

The creators of this technology, known as the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack, are will attend Strata to share their knowledge of the platform and how it can be put to use.