New Products

If you are charged with the task of leveraging IT to help your company make better business decisions, check out the new JasperServer Professional from JasperSoft. Built on the JasperServer Open Source Project, this product is a business intelligence (BI) server that offers ad hoc reporting and analysis intended to simplify the creation of customized reports. JasperServer Professional offers, according to its maker, “everyone in an organization the power to create his or her own BI reports” that are tailored to his or her own needs. In addition, the server is certified with a wide range of third-party platforms, including Apace Tomcat, MySQL, various Linux distros and Unices and more. Customers opting for the subscription service can obtain enterprise-class support and training, indemnification, commercial licensing, access to the customer portal and so on. The Open Source edition of JasperServer, as well as an evaluation edition of the commercial product, are available for download at JasperSoft's Web site.

www.jaspersoft.com and www.jasperforge.org

No, friends, this new computer from eXcito has nothing to do with our president emeritus, Bill Clinton! Bubba Server, recently released by eXcito of Sweden, is a diminutive, multifunction, Debian-powered device for the home or SOHO, dubbed by its producer as a “lifestyle home-server”. After connecting Bubba to broadband, it's ready to function as any number of servers for you right out of the box: file, Web, FTP, backup, mail (IMAP, SMTP, POP) and so on. Bubba's main features, sayeth eXcito, are the ability to “access your files and different e-mail accounts from any location”, its small footprint (18 x 11 x 4cm) and quiet, fanless operation (max. 28dB in active mode). You can acquire your own Bubba with either an 80GB or 250GB hard drive.

www.excito.com

While the heavy-hitting PC makers have shipped and supported Linux desktops worldwide, here at home in the US they have been intimidated into keeping their cupboards bare. What would we do without our scrappy entrepreneurs who have built their Linux-PC empires from scratch? In order for the Linux desktop finally to get traction, the big guys need to bless it and support it, and perhaps Lenovo's new ThinkPad T60p Linux Mobile Workstation will finally ignite some momentum. With the T60p, Lenovo is starting with the high end, as this device is intended mainly for electronic engineers doing integrated circuit and board-level design who desire mobility. Lenovo is currently certifying requisite design apps from companies such as Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics, which will run on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10); the latter is fully supported via Lenovo's Help Center. One drawback to the T60p is that, although SLED 10 is supported, it does not come pre-installed. We hope that the efforts invested here will trickle down.

www.lenovo.com

It is exciting to see a range of firms leveraging the open-source model to provide high-end applications. Openbravo (both the company and app name) finds its niche as an open-source, Web-based enterprise management solution for small and mid-sized enterprises. The application provides for fully integrated management of key business functions such as CRM, billing, data, procurement, inventory, projects, services, production, financial/accounting and business intelligence. Openbravo claims that its architecture is “revolutionary”, utilizing “a unique combination of MVC and MDD development frameworks”, as well as its own engine for generating application binaries from the MDD dictionary, called WAD. New features in the new r2.11 include several new modules, expanded Web Services features, an improved interface and expanded documentation.

www.openbravo.com