[pixelmonkey]

I've actually been running an analytics company for a few years (http://parse.ly), and as a result of seeing what you're describing and thinking it was pretty strange -- that many companies have "not invented here" syndrome about analytics -- we actually turned our data collection and event enrichment infrastructure into a fully-managed cloud service. It's called Parse.ly Data Pipeline, and is described here: http://parse.ly/data-pipeline.

Together with cloud SQL tools like BigQuery or Redshift, it gets rid of the need to build a "full analytics stack" on your own. You can license the data collection/enrichment from us (we've already scaled it to billions of monthly events), you can use our clean starting schema (over 100 enriched fields per event), and then you can pipe the data into a fully-managed analytics warehouse, or just analyze it in raw form. Then you can actually spend all your time focusing on insights, rather than fussing about data collection clusters, pipelines, ETLs, etc.

I would love to hear what you think of the idea; it was launched just a few months ago.