MDX for the hard of thinking

That includes me. Between Mondrian's exciting behaviour (at least that of the schema editor) and the vagaries of MDX, I'm finding this OLAP stuff hard to get into. This is a nice rundown on what MDX is. I'm still hoping there's a nifty Mondrian intro I haven't found yet.  http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/10894_1495511_6/MDX-at-First-Glance-Introduction-to-SQL-Server-MDX-Essentials.htm

Movements in the IT world

First shots fired in cyber-war

The security consulting business isn't going anywhere. It's interesting to note that an attack that requires a state-level actor is now a very real possibility in the near term. I remember when you'd have been laughed out of the room for such a suggestion.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/09/stuxnet_enisa_response/

IT industry consolidation means the first patent-war is on

The first shots have long since gone quiet. It's like the GFC of intellectual property.
See this diagram for the current state of mobile-phone/IT/consumer electronics.
http://infobeautiful2.s3.amazonaws.com/whos_suing_whom.png

Anyone got some hard data on the consolidation of the IT industry? The merger between consumer technology and IT industries? By revenue? There's rich picking for somone to do the numbers, and make a pretty picture.

Virtualisation and Service Oriented Architecture

I was reading over at the TIBCOmmunity site regarding the impact of virtualisation on architecture
( http://www.tibcommunity.com/blogs/soa-architecture/2009/07/24/virtualization-and-its-affect-on-architecture ). There's some handy information here, but it feels a bit lost under a heading of "SOA architecture"; so I thought I'd have a go, under the heading of "I think...".

Virtualisation is the capability to encapsulate arbitrarily complex environments (by adding yet another layer of abstraction, naturally). Virtualisation is a means of utilising commodity hardware in ways that were previously the preserve of esoteric, expensive, proprietary systems.

What does this mean in the context of SOA?

I think the eventual result is that services can/will be built as software appliances. The moves around OSGi are heading in this direction, allowing a more 'focussed' environment to be built. I'll expand on my view of a software appliance life cycle in a later post.

I do believe that the eventual goal around a SOA (at a technical level) should be something like an AMI virtual machine (the lingua franca of the cloud), with defined "production", and management,  services. This could/should be hosted in some cloud (public/private), or combination of clouds. The services/VMs may depend on other defined services (provided in a SaaS, or other, manner). Some overarching management environment will be required to manage the relationships between services (and I believe that this is where VMware is heading, fast).