I’m getting psyched for my first big developer event with Yahoo!. Tomorrow we’re hosting the 3rd Annual Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. “What’s ‘Hadoop,’” you ask, and why is it so important as to have its very own summit? Hadoop is an open-source technology that lets companies like Yahoo! crunch unimaginable volumes of data — I’m talking about 16 terabytes every day. And why does that matter? Well, it’s what makes it possible for us to create highly relevant online and mobile experiences for the 600 million people around the globe who visit Yahoo! 11 billion times a month. In short, Hadoop is the magic behind every click at Yahoo!.

I’m honored to have the opportunity to stand in front of a thousand or so Hadoop technology leaders and developers to talk about how Yahoo! uses Hadoop and the cloud to deliver the right content and the right ads to the right people every second of every day. As the world’s largest user of Hadoop, there’s no doubt in our minds here at Yahoo! that it brings us significant value and is ready for mainstream, enterprise use. In fact, we believe Hadoop will play a big part in the future of the Web.

Everyone knows that the volume of content being published and shared on the Web is growing at a crazy pace. At Yahoo!, we want to help filter out the noise by bringing you the content that’s most personally relevant to you. But doing that requires us to make sense of this BIG data and do it superfast, which would simply be impossible to do if we didn’t have the major data processing power of Hadoop. In the amount of time it takes sunlight to reach the earth (8.3 minutes), Hadoop processes more than 300 million calculations with our data.

And that’s just one example of what Hadoop can do — we’re thankful for the passionate and brilliant Hadoop community and the supportive sponsors of this week’s Summit, all of whom are doing amazing things with this technology as well. Should be a great summit — for those of you who are just dying for more geeky details, follow #hadoopsummit on Twitter, or look for our photos on Flickr.

—Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Follow Blake Irving on Twitter: @blakei