Self-Service BI, PowerPivot and the future of traditional BI (DWH, OLAP, MDX)

Since I’m using the recently released Microsoft PowerPivot Add-In for Excel 2010 and when reading the rumors about the future of traditional OLAP and MDX there are some questions about the big picture of a BI-environment including self-service functionality. Basically, the BI world of the past had excepted the idea of a central data warehouse having a meta data layer such as OLAP to perfectly present the information to the end users. What about this new player PowerPivot then? How does this fit into the picture? Is there still a future for things like OLAP, MDX, central data warehouses or do we only need to roll out self-service BI functionality to every desktop PC? Some people have asked me questions about my point of view here and although I’m not a Microsoft representative I’d like to share my personal opinion with you:

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