ReadWriteEnterprise

So you want to buy a tractor? Build a house? Scrabble? So do the more than 62 million other gamers who play Farmville daily. That's why keeping its communities humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and responding to issues in real-time is no game for Zynga.

To get the job done, the company turned to Vertica, which is now owned by HP. Says Ken Rudin, VP of Analytcs at Zynga: "With over 40 million players, 3TB of new data a day and 230 nodes spread across two clusters, Zynga's columnar data warehouse from Vertica is no analytical windup toy."

Today HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced HP's new strategy: cloud, connectivity and software. Mobility, consumerization of IT and big data will all play a role in this new strategy. In particular, HP's WebOS and Vertica acquisitions will drive it forward.

Here's a look at the specific plans Apotheker discussed.

As we've said before, consolidation is a watch-word for 2011. Every week we're seeing acquisitions in the cloud, data analysis and enterprise social software market. We've already covered one of this week's biggest announcements: RIM's acquisition of Gist. Here are three more acquisitions worth taking note of.