OLAP
I've had three or four leads recently for doing work with Microsoft's OLAP Services. In a couple of the cases, the client didn't realize that OLAP pretty much solved their problem with a minimal of fuss until I brought it to their attention. Since OLAP and DTS (Data Transformation Services) are about the only tools I miss when working on pure open source projects, it's not hard for me to sell people on it.
Why do people need to be sold on it to begin with?
I think that OLAP and LDAP share something in this area. OLAP diverges from standard RDBMS practices enough that few people have an opportunity to master it. Even after grasping the basics and working with OLAP over the course of a few years, I still find writing nontrivial multidimensional reports to be painful.
LDAP bridges the world of network infrastructure and object-oriented databases. It takes someone with a decent footing in the worlds of application development, database design, and network infrastrcture to really make the most of a deployment. Needless to say, those people are hard to find, and I never seem to have the other skills present on the teams I'm on to implement what I understand to be a decent authentication framework.
10:43:02 AM 
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