Bluenog released an application suite on Monday that bundles portal software along with content management and BI (business intelligence).

Bluenog ICE, which leverages a number of open-source projects, is aimed at companies that don't want or can't afford to deal with buying each type of technology separately and then integrating them, said CEO Suresh Kuppusamy.

The combined suite gives smaller customers "one vendor for all issues," he added. "At the end of the day, they get one throat to choke."

Before founding the Piscataway, New Jersey, startup, Kuppusamy was solutions architect for the Eastern Region at the application server and portal giant BEA, now owned by Oracle. Co-founders Scott Barnett and Sastry Taruvai also worked at BEA.

"We totally know the space and what it takes to build enterprise applications," Kuppusamy said.

Supported platforms include Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS. Compatible application servers include JBoss, Apache Tomcat, WebLogic and Glassfish. Database support includes DB/2, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Bluenog does not profess to provide advanced BI analytics within ICE. Instead, it focuses on enabling business users to quickly and easily generate reports.

Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is not using the full ICE suite, but is about to sign a deal for the CMS component, said Sri Vinay, associate director of IT for the center.

CIESIN, which hosts thousands of Web pages and is also building new sites, spent about a year evaluating several CMS options but ultimately chose Bluenog because unlike other products they tested, its architecture doesn't tightly couple the interface to the document repository, according to Vinay.

"In the future, if you had to use some other front-end code, you can still pull [data] from their repository," he said.

CIESIN, which has about 50 employees and a roughly 12-member IT team, was also looking to find something workable within fairly tight budget constraints, but didn't go with a noncommercial open-source project because they wanted a vendor to hold accountable, he said.

Bluenog ICE is priced at US$25,000 per server per year and is available globally. Round-the-clock support is also available.