Columnists’ corner: While telecoms have been busy promoting the advantages of WiMax, Ephraim Schwartz investigates what’s behind the push for WiMax. And it’s not necessarily about serving customers. “End-users and corporate users may not have much say in how this plays out in the end,” Schwartz reports. From the feature well: A new approach to an old IT problem is emerging. It’s known as master data management, and it can help heal the sad state of data in most back offices. “Similar to a complete SOA deployment a complete master data management effort is a huge undertaking, one that takes years and consumes a lot of resources with marginal interim benefit,” explains Galen Gruman in Reopening the data mart. Gruman also offers a few small steps for getting started. Podcasts: Real World SOA looks at considering semantics when building a service-oriented architecture. “Application semantics is something we’re always going to deal with whether it’s integration, SOA or just making two applications communicate with each other,” explains host David Linthicum. “If you can’t get semantics right … then you can’t pass go.” Tune in here. The news beat: At its Oracle OpenWorld user conference, Oracle pushes SOA in the form of Fusion middleware and unveils WebCenter Suite, a new toolbox for integrating portals, applications and Web 2.0 technologies. Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, meanwhile, speaks at Oracle’s show about HP plans to streamline operations so it has fewer, but deeper, partnerships. And AMD foreshadows its own ‘Fusion’ — which will be born from placing an x86 chip and a graphics processor onto a single piece of silicon. Technology Industry