MS Analysis Services is an amazing product... Just about every mid-size and up company owns this (as part of SQL Server 2000 EE) and I don't think any of them realize that they are sitting on a fully fledged OLAP platform. Literally, many larger companies already own the technology to completely transform the way the use data for decision making, but so few people actually understand what it takes to put the theory into action that no one realizes it.

I've been pushing people to consider its use for a couple of years now at my company, and have finally started making some headway. I have found (partly by luck) that Six Sigma project managers are perfect candidates and users - they are trained to eat up data, create statistics from the rawest data possible, and find trends and problem spots, all of which is a perfect fit for OLAP.

It is easy enough to make a cube from any data source, but sums, distinct counts, and averages, although showing immediate insight are just the tip of the iceberg. SOme other measures that can used to great effect in any cube with a little MDX knowledge are:

Median (using the Median function)
Change from ParallelPeriod - [Amount]-[ParallelPeriod([Year]),[Amount]) (link)
Standard Deviation - Stdev(Set[, Numeric Expression])
Moving averages - Avg(Time.CurrentMember.Lag(14):Time.CurrentMember, [Closing Price]) (link)

I plan to include these as measures in nearly every cube for now on... anyone looking for insight in to their data will eat it all up.