What exactly is all the hype about the "Next Generation" of data warehouses. If we take a step back, the primary reason for building a Data Warehouse was to have a single source of truth across the organization, which will improve streamlined reporting and analytical capabilities. In the past decade we have made forays into "real time" data warehousing, which is a very relative term when you apply a broad brush context to the entire industry. Now we are in the middle of "text data integration" or "unstructured data integration", cloud computing, data virtualization, social intelligence and more to come. Where and what exactly is "next generation" in this context? In my opinion, the "next generation" of data warehousing will be a combination of  platform enablement with "MDM",  relationship management with Social Intelligence and Sentiment Analysis, transactional information from Web2.x based systems and  SOA enabled SCM, ERP and Financial systems (read services). Technology choices will be enabled by cloud largely, and infrastructure will be commodity driven with appliances playing the larger role.

Vendor hype cycles will continue to confuse you across the board. as the year grows, there will be more discussions on this subject by everybody. Your thoughts....