Ok, this will be short. XMLA, for those who have never heard of it, is XML for Analysis, a standard for connecting OLAP service providers to front ends like query builders, OLAP browsers etc. Why do we need it? Because monolithic solutions in OLAP domain raises the cost and decreases the flexibility of solutions, but interoperability in this domain seems to be going down. The XMLA council seems to be inactive for a long period of time, and XMLA home page is taken over by Simba technologies.

At the moment, there are quite a few solutions as OLAP front ends, and even less support XMLA, for the standard itself is usually not implemented to the full. This is bad news in general. I do not want to have to pick a vendor and a product set to get an end to end solution for OLAP. If some vendor with more power like MS or IBM can take over XMLA, we might see more benefit, otherwise I’ll have to work on a deeper analysis of the market to achive the type of freedom I want.