Argh, just when the really interesting bits kicked in! Can you mention any relevant papers, links or conversational transcripts? (well... that last would stretch the bounds of the believable, but still, one has to ask) Is there any way you could convince him to update about the conversation, so as to circumvent the gag order^Wrequest?

Well first I'll point you at this discussion of What Is OLAP. It seems reasonably well-written and hype-free. Skip down to the part about the "FASMI test".

"Fast" is definitely something we're interested in. We come from an ecommerce background, so interactive response (generally sub-second) is indelibly etched into our brains.

"Analysis" is just what it sounds like. The last sentence, for example, mentions time series analysis, cost allocations, currency translation, etc. To over-simplify somewhat, if you can think of it being presented as a graph, then it's analysis. I'll just point out that my company has done applications for various clients in the financial industry. You'll have to imagine what that entails.

"Shared" involves fine-grained security as well as incremental updates. These are two features that we've been building out over the last couple releases, as you'd see if you followed our product announcements (i.e. I don't think I'm giving anything away by pointing that out).

"Multidimensional" is obviously what faceted classification is all about.

"Information" means scaling up to handling lots and lots of data. I think we're pretty good at scale, and we're always looking at ways to scale further.

So there's a bit more detail, while still remaining sufficiently hand-wavy.