Dot Net Nuke (DNN) released its Dot Net Nuke Professional Edition version 5.1 this week. I spoke with the company’s president and CEO, Navin Nagiah, about the launch of  DNN Professional Edition version 5.1 and about the company’s success at building open source solutions on top of the Microsoft development stack.

Penton Media, the company that owns DevProConnections, hired DNN to convert and upgrade the websites for WindowsITPro, SQL Server Magazine, and other properties, including DevProConnections. You will be seeing the results of DNN’s efforts shortly, and when the new site is up and running I invite your feedback on how they’re doing. Editors at Penton are particularly looking forward to enhanced web 2.0 social networking features (rating, sharing, commenting, etc.) that will give even more voice to our reader contributors.

Nagiah explained that an essential feature of the DNN product, an open source web content management and application development framework for the Microsoft .NET Framework platform, is its modular architecture. An organization can either purchase and deploy DNN as a package, or it can remove specific modules and replace them with other commercial modules or build its own modules and plug them in. According to Nagiah “the whole framework will still work fine.” The product is used to power websites with rich features and applications. It comes in two editions: as a free download, The Community Edition, in keeping with DNNs open-source roots, and as a version optimized for business-critical applications, the Professional Edition, which is $1,999 per instance annual subscription.

There are up to 140,000 downloads of Dot Net Nuke per month, Nagiah says. He explained that this community is “inherently commercial by nature, “ and can be divided into three types of business. First there are the system integrators, about 450 companies who use the platform to customize a solution to an end user customer. Then there are the module vendors, around 400 small independent software vendors (ISVs) who build small software modules on top of DNN and sell it in the DNN marketplace or elsewhere, for prices ranging from 50 to 500 dollars per module. Finally there more than 20 hosting provider companies in the DNN ecosystem who generate revenue by specializing in DNN hosting.

Dot Net Nuke Professional Edition 5.1 includes:

• A tested and verified version of DNN including the open source core framework
• Content management, security, analytics, scalability, and network services features exclusive to the professional edition
• Access to the online professional edition knowledge base
• Product documentation
• Unlimited product support with second-level support from DNN architects and engineers
• Email notification of security patches and product updates
• Product copyright indemnification