It was a huge. EMC World 2011, held at The Venetian in Las Vegas, had 500 educational sessions, 100 hands-on labs and exhibits from a hundred leading IT companies and was attended by more than 10,000 people. And I’m glad that there was a virtual exclusive access pass available at Facebook for those who couldn’t make it to the conference. The pass provided online access to the conference’s keynotes and super sessions. Moreover, live updates and thoughts on big data were flooding Twitter. There was participation from YouTube and other social media channels as well, but more importantly, we were there covering the event live, holding post keynote interviews all throughout EMC World, discussing the important topics with the important people at the event (see SiliconAngle.tv for our entire collection of EMC World 2011 videos).

With “Cloud Meets Big Data” as its theme, the conference talked about how big data is transforming information technology. It became the hub for the Momentum Conference which had 600 attendees, as well as the site for the first ever Data Scientist Summit, Big Data Storage Summit and CIO Summit, congregating executive, technologies, experts with customers to share ideas and technologies that transform and revolutionize the modern society.

“Cloud and Big Data are two of the most disruptive technologies to come along in a long time and are trends affecting everyone who works in IT. EMC World is focused on helping attendees accelerate their journey to the cloud and use it to take advantage of the Big Data opportunity – while at the same time accelerating their careers. This year, we’re making it easier than ever for anyone to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge being shared at this conference,” said Jeremy Burton, EMC’s Chief Marketing Officer.

The conference was opened by the take of EMC’s Chairman, President and CEO Joe Tucci on the transformation opportunities mounted by private, public and hybrid cloud, and big data. This directly affects and changes the way business manage and extract value from their heaps of information which is an indispensable piece as an asset. There had been a launch of new products, relationship and strategic directions aiming to help pick up the pace of customer’s transition to the cloud by leveraging with big data. EMC, along with Mellanox, Datastax, NetApp and Snaplogic announced that their addition of products to Hadoop’s ecology. Jeff Kelly expounds the reasons for EMC’s move here. We also have Kristen Nicole detailing EMC’s VP CTO for Global Marketing Chuck Hollis’ take on Hadoop, Project Lightening and Human Capital in the Cloud. Here’s John Furrier as well talking about EMC and Hadoop.

In addition, the conference also held a competition they dubbed as VEX Robotics, participated by middle and high school student from Nevada, California, Washington and Maryland.

SiliconANGLE’s TheCube has landed interviews from the company’s top executives, which you can replay here. The Cube is hosted by SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier and Wikibon analysts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. You can also replay the conference itself at facebook.com/emccorp.