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The big guns of the technology world are sometimes like that aging baseball team making another run for the World Series.

The baseball team's roster is filled with stars in the later part of their careers. They are not as fast as the younger players they oppose. But they sure have experience and enough knowledge to know exactly how to exploit the weaknesses of those kids with the big bats and strong arms.

The data boom is making analytics companies some of the hottest properties in the market. That's evident from today's news that EMC is buying Greenplum, a data warehouse, big data and analytics company used by Skype, T-Mobile and a host of companies including NASDAQ and Fox Interactive Media.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Greenplum is a privately held company that has raised $61 million in venture financing. Greenplum is just 7 years old but, according to eWeek, already has proved a formidable challenger to such technology giants as Oracle, which ironically has an investment in the company.

Cloudera is working with Quest Software to provide a connector into Oracle for Hadoop, the open-source, distrbuted data management platform.

The connector, called "Ora-Oop," provides a way to transfer data between Oracle and Hadoop. The service will be available in the fourth quarter for download through Cloudera and Quest.

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company's Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for "multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency" enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite's SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP.

Where there are definitions, there are reasons to bend them. Outsourcing, the practice of bringing outside organizations to manage a part the business process, is one of those concepts.

In this post, we'll take a brief stroll through the work of Caliber Point in mixing up both outsourcing and cloud computing.

We look at where it touches on major shifts in enterprise software architectures and franchises like Oracle which this software-as-a-service product is built on.

The VMforce news we've reported on today makes it likely game for our weekly poll.

What we want to know is your view on how significant the VMforce platform will be for the market. The view from here: The alliance between Salesforce.com and VMware will depend on the Java developer community the two companies develop.

So, in your opinion, what does VMforce mean for competing vendors such as Google, Amazon, Oracle and SAP?

The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud.

So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google's chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact.

It is fairly evident that the iPad and cloud computing are deeply tied to each other. A selection of storage and cloud management apps now are available on the iPad. So, we want to know: "How will the iPad affect cloud computing?"

But before we get to that question, let's take a look at last week's poll. We asked: "Is Oracle a Cloud company?"

In our poll last week, we asked: "Does it Really Matter How Cloud Computing Is Defined?" This week, we want to know: "Is Oracle a cloud company?" The questions have some relationship as how we defien cloud computing has some impact on the way we view a company and its overall vision.

As for the overall debate, most of our respondents to last week's question agreed with the RedMonk team on this one. The number one response :

"It's simple. Just think of cloud computing as servers, middleware and apps."

The interest in this topic is shifting. About 100 or so people responded to the poll, compared to past polls that have had more than 1,000 votes. Maybe the more legitimate question should be: " Does it NOT matter at all how cloud computing is defined?"

What is the effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems on cloud computing? Well, there have been quite a few if you look at where Sun's best and brightest have moved on to in the past few months.

Tim Bray is the latest Sun star to move on. You may know Bray as the co-founder of XML. Eve Maler is also a co-founder of XML. She had worked with Bray for many years until her departure from Sun last Spring to join PayPal. Eve as many of you many know, is one of the leaders in developing identity standards and initiatives.