John - thanks for your detailed description of what you want to do. We have customers doing exactly what you described, using SSAS and our Analyzer zero-footprint IE front-end, for the very same reasons you described, in multiple industries: healthcare, insurance, real estate, finance, and retail, for example. This model makes a lot of sense if, as you described, you have data that would be of interest to an audience willing to pay for access to three things: 1) the data (value-added industry data), 2) a set of pre-built reports and dashboards presenting that data in helpful ways, and 3) a way for the users to interact with that data so they can do their own analysis, modify the reports/dashbaords as they need to, save their mods, collaborate with others, etc.

Basically your OP described our Analyzer SaaS version in detail, as well as the reasons some of our customers are doing that. I say "some" because we also have versions of Analyzer for internal corporate BI and for OEM bundling. In the case of Analyzer SaaS, we don't host anything, you do. Analyzer SaaS comes out of the box with all the multi-tenant, admin, and security aspects built in. Since Analyzer is 100% zero-footprint, users only need to have the IE web browser, with nothing else needed for any user to access any feature. Our pricing is a lot less than BO and Cognos, making it a very successful business model for our SaaS customers, turning BI into a new and growing revenue stream for them.

You can reach me at bob dot abernethy at strategycompanion dot com. Looking forward to discussing this more.