SOA: In this screencast inside a blog post, Jon Udell explores Mindreef’s Coral tool for collaboratively building Web services. “In theory the product enables you to record, replay, analyze, simulate, and selectively intermediate XML transactions that touch a mixture of services — including internal ones that you control and external ones that you don’t. How that works out in practice will be fascinating to watch,” Udell opines in Test-driven SOA. Databases: MySQL and Business Objects team up to meld the open source database with a bundle of BI tools. Hewlett-Packard says it will combine 762 data marts around the globe into a single datawarehouse to get a better sense of its own business as well as to learn how it can better service customers. Telecom: Bell Labs researchers work on new applications for low-cost 4G mobile phone technology, and Vodafone slaps down $4.5 billion for Turkish phone operator Telsim. SaaS: Ephraim Schwartz explains how the software-as-a-service concept can be taken one step further, in Do-it-yourself software services? In this column, he proposes a hybrid solution that would see customers rolling their own services and, in turn, offering those to partners to consume as services. For instance, Wal-Mart could expedite getting its suppliers to use its SCM application by offering it to them, SaaS-style. Technology Industry