Ladies and Gents,
This seems to belong in the "general discussion" area.

I happen to be one of the leading BI people. We have tools and data models that we sell to large corporates for BI.  YT channel is here. http://www.youtube.com/user/InstantBI. 

Our claim to fame is that we can build the ETL for a data warehouse at about half the people time of the next best. We recently outdid Oracle PS by a factor of about 5 when you measure by number of fields mapped from the operational systems across to the data warehouse. We also happen to have the most cost effective generalised data models for BI.

We also happen to do a little DNN because we run our web site on DNN. www.instantbi.com. 

So I have been thinking that it might make sense to extend our data models to include DNN as a source "out of the box". We already have pretty extensive web models. Anyone interested can read about there here, 
http://www.instantbi.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=saY2w9vOetc%3d&tabid=59&mid=499 

So I am kind of wondering our loud if those people who are putting DNN sites into larger firms want to be able to also put in a data warehouse or BI capability....or if they do not want to do one themselves and their client wants one do they want to resell or even just reference for a finders fee to us and our build partner in Europe Key Work. www.key-work.de. 

I am just "thinking aloud". I am wondering if clients of DNN are now large enough, robust enough and numerous enough to actually want customised data warehousing and BI. I would be interested to know the status of BI with respect to DNN.

My first thought about this is that DNN as the web site captures a lot of data for a mid tier company but that data will need to be integrated to the operational systems so I would think it is outside the scope of DNN corp to try and build itself such a data warehouse. We have such a data model already in existence and we would only need to extend it to support DNN. Such an idea might interest existing DNN installed accounts.

All comments welcome.

Best Regards 

Peter 

Hello Ladies and Gents,
I thought I would bump this with some news.

As part of our own marketing efforts we have built a data warehouse off the back of the community edition version of DNN 6.2.

This data warehouse allows us to collected the data from numerous DNN sites, each with sub portals if that be the case, and consolidate the data from all the different sites into a single staging area. From that staging area we propagate the data to the data warehouse.

We have released portions of this code as free to the public for those who want a "starter kit" for building a data warehouse that has DNN as one of the sources.

Of course, the vast majority of DNN users will have other operational systems and ERPs as data sources as well. Our data models are, we would claim, the most cost effective in the BI business. So we can integrate data from many operational systems into our data models...DNN is just one more source for us.

The starter kit is in the link below for the latest beta version. You can do with it what you like apart from pass it off as your own work or try and sell it to others. It is a genuine offer to show people how to get started. Yes, it is a "freebie" that might persuade some people to use our products and services in production. But DNN currently has no data warehouse add on and will likely never have one because there is no way DNN corp can build data models like our data models and run projects to integrate data from many operational systems.

So I see this as entirely complementary to DNN corp. I would like to see clients of DNN build data warehouses to make their companies more successful by being able to more effectively compete in the marketplace. We use DNN as our public "storefront" and we are counting things like downloads of our various papers and presentations to see how we are going.

If anyone wants to discuss this in more detail I am on peter.nolan@instantbi.com. I am not on these forums so much. I only come over when there is some problem on our site and I am looking for a remedy.

Thanks and best regards

Peter 

http://www.youtube.com/user/InstantBI...
http://www.youtube.com/user/InstantBI

The full 3.1.01 beta download is here. We even have a newly released feature to enable email marketing that then also takes the email solicitations and places them into the data warehouse so that the effectiveness of the email campaigns can be properly measured. We have a campaign sub model that links to all this.

http://www.instantbi.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=J7RWhm7lTWA%3d&tabid=59&mid=445