Bluenog ICE is an “Integrated Collaborative Environment” that leverages enterprise 2.0 technologies and tightly integrates three key components (content management, portal, and business intelligence) of any enterprise information architecture. This integration can reduce application silos, lower total cost of ownership, accelerate application development, and more tightly integrate business processes. Bluenog is a commercial product based on open source software, and customers receive the suite’s source code.

I recently spoke with Sastry Taruvai, Bluenog’s CIO. Like the two other founders, he was formerly at BEA and has extensive background in portal and content management. He said they have over 60 years of industry experience between them. In doing many enterprise implementations they noticed that the application silos between enterprise content management, portals and business intelligence tools. These three applications were often implemented and maintained separately. Integration was often desired but it required an army of high priced consultants. This brings back many memories of my work life in the 90s and early 00s.

To address these needs, they set out to produce Bluenog ICE. It consists of three modules tightly integrated in a unified framework that simplifies administration and security. Here is a snapshot of each module:

Bluenog CMS is an enterprise content management (ECM) system that securely creates, manages, publishes, and repurposes a wide range of content for use on the Web, in print, and by enterprise applications. See sample screen below.

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Bluenog RichPortal is a rich Internet application (RIA) portal development environment that provides secure access to dynamic content, reporting functionality, and enterprise applications via a customizable and interactive user interface. See sample screen below.

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Bluenog BI enables non-technical users to securely design, view, distribute, and interact with reports based on data stored throughout the enterprise. There is a visual designer that allows for drag and drop creation of reports that can mashup data from multiple sources. See sample screen below.

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This seems like a great combination so I had Sastry walk me through some use cases. I could see the cost savings from having three applications in one but I wanted to understand the strategic advantages. First, we discussed an outwardly facing web portal for a company that manages 401K accounts. It serves three main audiences. First, there are clients who want to look at their accounts from a variety of perspectives. They will also want to explore what-if scenarios to help with future investment decisions. Then there are client administration personnel who access multiple portfolios, as well as plan sponsors who act as brokers or advisors and make investment decisions for clients. They will want access to a more robust coverage of business intelligence to help guide their professional decisions. The integration of content management and business intelligence with the portal allows it to serve the multiple needs of each audience.

Sastry walked me through another example inside the enterprise. The business intelligence component allows users to create mashups to pull data from multiple sources, (e.g., the CRM system, SAP for ordering, and others). You can create a unified view around all aspects of a topic that is seen through the portal. Then it can be stored and managed through the content management system. The system can be used to develop dashboards to monitor business processes or it can used to create collaboration tools that work within the process. There is out-of the box functionality related to a number of business processes and adapters for further integration needs.

One goal of the suite of integrated applications is to put more application design in the hands of business users and reduce the need for IT involvement. It lets the business user focus on their core competencies and not spend as much time and money on IT integration issues. I think the three components compliment each other nicely. It will be interesting to see where this goes.