This is designed to improve performance and scalability on very large systems. Database 3.3 is supported on server hardware from a range of vendors including HP, Dell, Sun and IBM. The software is also supported for such non-production uses as development and evaluation on Mac OSX 10.5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or higher (32-bit) and CentOS Linux 5.2 or higher (32-bit).

As part of the EDC initiative, Greenplum is assembling an ecosystem of customers and partners who embrace this new approach and are collaborating with Greenplum to create new technologies and standards that leverage the capabilities of the EDC platform. Early participants deploying EDC platforms on Greenplum Database include Fox Interactive Media/MySpace, Zions Bancorporation and Future Group.

I think that BI vendors will want to join in allowing Greenplum, among others, to refine and advance the notion of data warehouse "middleware" layers. This takes a burden off of IT, which can focus on providing virtualized resource pools in which to deploy solutions such as Greenplum's.

As commodity hardware is used to undergird these virtualized on-premises clouds, the total costs contract. And, as we've seen with Amazon, Rackspace and others, the costs for moving data to a third-party clouds offers other potentially compelling cost advantages, even as scale issues about moving data around and security concerns are being addressed.

The automated warehouse layer approach benefits the BI vendors, as their tools and analystics engines can leverage the coalesced cloud-based data that Greenplum provides. The more and better the data, the better the BI. Cloud providers, too, may examine Greenplum with an eye to prtoviding data warehouse instances "as a service," a value-added data service opportunity to expand general cloud services.

And, of course, the biggest winners are the business analysts and business managers -- at enterprises as well as SMBs -- who can finally get the insights from massive data pools that they long for and a price they can realistically consider.

There will be a building symbiotic relationship between cloud computing and such data warehousing solutions as Greenplum's Enterprise Data Cloud. The more data that can become housed in accessible clouds, the more need to access, manage and provision additional data for analysis pay-offs.

And the more tools there are for leveraging cloud-based data, the more value there will be to moving data to clouds ... on so on. The chicken-and-egg relationship is clearly under way, with solutions providers like Greenplum offering a needed catalyst to the ramp-up process.