For best results, listen to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” while reading this … After weeks of planning, coordination and training, Cloud Connect Santa Clara is finally upon us — that time when every cloud vendor not big or egotistical enough to throw its own show is gathering here in Silicon Valley to show off their wares. Here’s a quick preview of the first day to whet your whistle ahead of my first wave of cloud dispatches from the front line.

The first day’s keynotes seem to be rapid-fire, featuring Thinking Out Cloud (a cloud blog — hey, where’s my invitation to keynote?), OpsCode, Cisco Systems, LinkedIn, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Bitcurrent, the Cloud Security Alliance and IBM discussing their current views of the cloud, all in the span of about two hours.

Afterward, I’ll be running around meeting with cloud thought leaders while the general attendance will be enjoying panels covering the “love story” between Rackspace and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift), cloud design, cloud economics and vendor-specific presentations on the benefits of one model over another.

There are 90(!) exhibitors on the show floor this year. I’m going to try to do everything and see everything — in fact, feel free to ping me on Twitter at @m_wein if you see something cool that I should pay attention to. Assuming I’m alive in the evening, both IBM and Rackspace are sponsoring after-events, and hopefully I’ll score some updates on their cloud strategy while I’m in attendance.

Some other quick, cool things I’ve learned about Cloud Connect:

By the time you read this, I’ll very likely be sipping my coffee and preparing for the first day’s start. And you can already see a few of the earliest Cloud Connect dispatches on TalkinCloud today.

Let’s do this thing, Cloud Connect.