As Big Data soars to the top of this year's enterprise IT "American Top 40" list, it's educational to take a look at how the topic will be handled at the upcoming Big Data Expo (which is co-located with Cloud Expo in New York June 11-14.)

I used the word "transformative" in a recent post to describe cloud computing, and it's good to see I'm not alone. IBM will be presenting on that topic, claiming that "cloud-based, real-time analytics can help save more than 50% in business insight-related costs, and collaborative business process services can help increase employee productivity by 25%." Yee-hah, let's hope so.

But enough of Blue for now - Apache Hadoop is the core technology driving the New Big Data era, and will be on the program. The key will be to see its use expand beyond Yahoo and the monster social sites into traditional business use cases from the likes of American Airlines, media companies, and online retailers. The unstructured nature of this data will be the subject of one of the sessions as well.

Big Data's scientific roots are still anchoring the modern era, so a presentation from DNAnexus that outlines the oncoming reality of the $1,000 genome should be popular.

The Venn Diagram of cloud and Big Data will no doubt be a big topic at the co-located events, and a session devoted to co-located cloud and Big Data is on the agenda. Real-world aspects of this approach include "organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter," according to the conference materials.

Big-Data tools are also on the agenda, as the idea of cloud & Big Data ecosystems, an important development for enterprise IT shops who are seeking an overall, holistic approach to cloud computing.

Security is in there as well, of course. I plan to be in New York that week, so tweet me up if you'd like to get together.

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