Columbia University CIESIN Deploys Bluenog ICE

PISCATAWAY, N.J., Oct. 28, 2008 — Bluenog, an enterprise software and solutions company, today announced that Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) has started deploying Bluenog ICE, the industry’s first integrated suite of content management (ECM or CMS), portal, and business intelligence (BI) software. CIESIN is a center within Columbia University’s Earth Institute that helps scientists, decision-makers, and the public better understand the changing relationship between human beings and the environment. Bluenog ICE, an “Integrated Collaborative Environment” that leverages Web 2.0 technologies, will provide the infrastructure behind CIESIN’s many public-facing websites, which collectively comprise several thousand Web pages. More information about Bluenog ICE is available at www.bluenog.com.

The Bluenog CMS component of Bluenog ICE enables CIESIN to create, update, and publish Web content in a timely fashion. The software replaces a labor-intensive manual process that required significant involvement from the organization’s IT group. CIESIN’s content management burden is especially great because content and information are frequently published on multiple websites, each having a distinctly different look and feel. CIESIN estimates that Bluenog ICE will significantly reduce its IT labor requirements for web content management, potentially by as much as 50%.

The Columbia University center chose Bluenog ICE at the end of an intensive evaluation process that lasted more than one year. Stand-alone offerings from Alfresco, Drupal, Hippo CMS, Liferay, Magnolia, and other vendors were also considered. One reason that Bluenog ICE was selected was its tight integration of CMS, portal, and BI capabilities into a unified framework, providing CIESIN with significant future deployment flexibility. Bluenog ICE’s ready integration with third-party software was also a CIESIN requirement, to leverage the center’s previous investments in Oracle databases, WebLogic Server, and other products.

Other factors influencing CIESIN’s selection of Bluenog ICE included the software’s modular architecture, which de-couples the websites from the content repository; support for multiple application servers, including Tomcat and WebLogic; cluster support for high-availability deployments; the responsive and service-oriented nature of the Bluenog team; and the overall value offered by the solution.

Optimum Blend of Commercial and Open Source

As an academic organization committed to widespread use and application of scientific data and information, CIESIN has a wide-ranging initiative to deploy open source software. Bluenog ICE is a commercial product based on open source software, and customers receive the suite’s source code.

“Like many organizations in higher education, CIESIN is attracted to the cost-saving benefits that open source can provide. As a research group addressing global-scale problems of sustainable development, we also have a cultural bias in favor of open source, but we also need guarantees that the software will work reliably in both the short and long term,” said Sri Vinayagamoorthy, associate director of IT, CIESIN. “Bluenog provides us with the best of both worlds: we get access to the Bluenog ICE source code, and we also get dependable commercial-grade support, indemnities, and the other benefits commercial vendors provide.”

About Bluenog ICE

Bluenog ICE’s tight integration of ECM, portal, and BI functionality frees IT organizations from the burden of selecting and manually integrating stand-alone offerings from separate vendors and later maintaining the integration and coordinating the vendors’ technical support services. This dramatically reduces the time, cost, and risk of developing, deploying, and managing the software. The integration also enables security, administration, and deployment to be shared across the suite’s three components, increasing data security and user convenience. Bluenog ICE can also work seamlessly with third-party CMS, portal, and BI offerings, increasing deployment flexibility and protecting customers’ previous IT investments.

About Bluenog

Bluenog is an enterprise software and solutions company. Our flagship product, Bluenog ICE, is an Integrated Collaborative Environment that tightly integrates content management, portal, and business intelligence software. The integration eliminates application silos, reduces total cost of ownership, and accelerates application development. Bluenog ICE is a commercial product that is built on open source and leverages Web 2.0 technologies. Leading organizations rely on Bluenog ICE to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIA) and to manage dynamic website content at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives. Bluenog Solutions Group specializes in meeting our customers’ unique challenges with pragmatic combinations of commercial and open source software. Bluenog is also an Oracle and Actuate reseller. Bluenog is headquartered in Piscataway, N.J. For more information, visit www.bluenog.com.

###

Media Contact:
Christian Danella
Prequent, Inc. (for Bluenog)
+1 (408) 275-6488 office
+1 (415) 350-4830 mobile
christian@prequent.com