Below are some expert opinions on how industry professionals view Business Intelligence and data warehousing.

OLAP Clients

End user applications that can request slices from OLAP servers and provide two- dimensional or multi-dimensional displays, user modifications, selections, ranking, calculations, etc., for visualization and navigation purposes. OLAP clients may be as simple as a spreadsheet program retrieving a slice for further work by a spreadsheet- literate user or as high-functioned as a financial modeling or sales analysis application. Extract from DM Review
What is OLAP?– A comprehensive and informative history of OLAP going back to its relational database roots in 1969.

OLAP from Wikipedia

OLAP is an acronym for On Line Analytical Processing. It is an approach to quickly provide the answer to analytical queries that are dimensional in nature. It is part of the broader category business intelligence, which also includes Extract transform load (ETL), relational reporting and data mining. The typical applications of OLAP are in business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business performance management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas. The term OLAP was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term OLTP (On Line Transaction Processing).

Databases configured for OLAP employ a multidimensional data model, allowing for complex analytical and ad-hoc queries with a rapid execution time. Nigel Pendse has suggested that an alternative and perhaps more descriptive term to describe the concept of OLAP is Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information (FASMI). They borrow aspects of navigational databases and hierarchical databases that are speedier than their relational kin.