Typical applications of OLAP include business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM),budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting and similar areas, with new applications coming up, such as agriculture. The term OLAP was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term OLTP (Online Transaction Processing).

Two leading OLAP products are Hyperion Solution's Essbase and Oracle's Express Server. OLAP products are typically designed for multiple-user environments, with the cost of the software based on the number of users.