Bowstreet's Web Automation Factory Breaks Major Bottleneck to e-commerce Adoption: Time, Cost and Pain of Customizing B2b Web Sites.PORTSMOUTH, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 8, 1999-- Breakthroughtechnology for mass-customizing B2B Web sites See vertical portal. targeted at Fortune 1000, B2B (Business to Business) Refers to one business communicating with or selling to another. See B2B e-commerce, B2C and B2G. B2B - business to business trading portals and application service providers (ASPs) Bowstreet Software Inc., (www.bowstreet.com), today announced the much-anticipated commercial release of the Bowstreet Web Automation Factory(TM), which breaks a critical e-commerce bottleneck by enabling companies to quickly deliver affordable, highly customized business-to-business Web sites for multiple customers and business partners. Bowstreet also announced that a growing list of Fortune 1000 companies and e-commerce leaders are beginning to use the XML- and directory-based suite to instantly "mass customize" their B2B Web sites. These customers include Federal Express, B2B industry portal innovator FreeMarkets, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Merrill Lynch Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER TYO: 8675 ), through its subsidiaries and affiliates, provides capital markets services, investment banking and advisory services, wealth management, asset management, insurance, banking and related products and services on a global basis. , NetRatings (a Nielsen Media company), Nortel, Sabre and Thomson Financial Thomson Financial A major provider of information, analytical tools, and consulting services to the financial community. The firm, a division of Thomson Corporation, is best known to investors for its First Call segment, which publishes consensus earnings Services. Bowstreet's Web Automation Factory is the first product that uses Directory Services Markup Language markup language Standard text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship among its parts. The most widely used markup languages are SGML, HTML, and XML. (DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) A set of XML tags that defines the contents of a directory. Developed by Bowstreet, Inc., Tewksbury, MA (www.bowstreet. ), an emerging e-commerce standard pioneered by Bowstreet and supported by IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and the Sun/Netscape Alliance. Sabre, the global leader in information technology for the travel and transportation industries, is working with the Bowstreet Web Automation Factory. "As we add functionality to our electronic travel distribution services, we need to meet ever-expanding needs for increased customization for our customers and broader integration with our business partners," said Bob Offutt, vice president of Sabre Labs. "We think the Web Automation Factory is specifically designed to help us meet those needs." The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory, based on patent-pending technology, eliminates what many industry observers believe to be the biggest obstacle to the adoption of B2B e-commerce (Business to Business Electronic-COMMERCE) Refers to one business selling to another business via the Web. See e-commerce. : the challenge of creating, maintaining and linking Web sites that provide many tightly integrated B2B connections, each customized for the unique needs of a different partner or customer. With today's tools and technology, this process is prohibitively time consuming, complex and costly, often creating a large IT backlog for new B2B capabilities and stalling critical e-commerce initiatives. Developing and launching a traditional enterprise Web e-commerce site typically costs $1 million, and the price tag is soaring by 25 percent per year, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. GartnerGroup of Stamford, Conn. (May 1999). Seventy-nine percent of that cost is labor-related. In the first half of 2000, Bowstreet will launch the Bowstreet Web Services (1) Loosely, any online service delivered over the Web. Such usage appears in articles from non-technical sources, but not in IT-oriented publications, because definition #2 below describes the correct use of the term. Marketplace, a central exchange on the Internet where companies can freely create, publish, capture and trade Web Services they can incorporate into their own custom B2B Web sites. "The business-to-business e-commerce gold rush on the Internet is in full swing," said Bob Crowley For the software, see . For the computer specialist, see . Bob Crowley (born in Cork, Ireland) is a theatre director, scenic and costume designer. He is the brother of director John Crowley. , President and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of Bowstreet. "But while other companies are arming the prospectors with picks, we're handing out sticks of dynamite. Our Web Automation Factory, together with our Web Services Marketplace, represents a huge advance over first-generation Internet technology and business models. It creates a whole new infrastructure and community for business-to-business on the Web." The Web Automation Factory's long-awaited announcement comes 16 months after former Tivoli CEO and Chairman Frank Moss Frank Moss may refer to:
Moving B2B from hand coding Writing in a programming language. Hand coding in assembly language or in a third-generation language, such as C or Java, is the traditional way programs have been developed. In contrast, visual programming tools allow full applications or parts of an application to be developed without to automated mass customization The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory overcomes the customization bottleneck enabling business managers and other non-technical users to customize Web sites for thousands of customers and partners, while IT professionals manage security and control. As a result, organizations can produce multiple B2B Web sites at a fraction of the cost of today's approaches, and in minutes instead of months. Today customers are hand-coding monolithic, hard-wired Web applications every time a new B2B business process or new Web site is needed for a business partner. The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory replaces these cumbersome methods and allows them to build "digital factories" that capture and automate the Web development process. These digital factories build customized B2B Web sites on the fly by dynamically assembling loosely coupled See loose coupling. software components known as Web services, which encapsulate en·cap·su·late v. 1. To form a capsule or sheath around. 2. To become encapsulated. en·cap content, data and business processes from either legacy systems or the Web. These Web services are published to corporate directories as XML XML in full Extensible Markup Language. Markup language developed to be a simplified and more structural version of SGML. It incorporates features of HTML (e.g., hypertext linking), but is designed to overcome some of HTML's limitations. metadata by IT professionals, along with automation templates which capture the "recipe" of how these services may be combined to create B2B Web sites. Line-of-business people, such as sales channel managers, employ a very easy-to-use tool which creates profiles that customize the B2B Web site to meet the needs of each business partner or customer. The profiles can be changed in a matter of moments at the click of a mouse as existing B2B relationships change or new ones are required. The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory will enable a large insurance company, for example, to automatically create customized Web sites for every one of its independent insurance agents. Each agent would have a dynamic view of the products they are licensed to sell, their commission structures, their state's pricing regulations and more. If a pricing regulation changes, a manager could implement the change across thousands of Web sites with the click of a mouse. Agents could instantly obtain up-to-date price quotes for their customers. "Organizations are expending enormous amounts of human and financial capital rolling out business-to-business e-commerce Web sites," said Matt Cain Matthew Thomas Cain (born October 1 1984 in Dothan, Alabama) is a starting pitcher for the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball. He is ft in ( m) tall and weighs lb ( kg). , vice president of META Group, Stamford, Conn. "The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory automates the Web development process, making it far easier for companies to build highly customized Web sites for multiple partners." Targeting Major Players in B2B e-commerce Fortune 1000 companies are using the Web Automation Factory to dramatically speed their transition of sales and distribution to the Web. Business-to-business Internet trading portals are using the Bowstreet Web Automation Factory to provide customized sites and business processes to buyers and sellers across numerous vertical markets. Application service providers (ASPs) need the Web Automation Factory to customize the applications they host for customers instead of simply providing cookie-cutter applications in smaller pieces. How it works The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory's four core components are: --Publisher(TM) is used by IT professionals to create and publish business processes in XML as a directory of Web services, thereby making them available for use by other businesses. --Automator(TM) is used by IT professionals to create templates that enable customized functionality and processes to be built into Web sites. In contrast to explicit programming, loosely coupled "Builders" within the template automate the calls to the various processes and data at run time. --Customizer(TM) is a browser-based system that is used by line-of-business managers to create and manage user profiles that drive the behavior of the Web site or application. The Customizer allows line-of-business people to create a customized Web experience for each and every partner. --The Bowstreet Web Automation Engine(TM) is the heart of the Factory. It manages all metadata in corporate directories and generates customized Web sites on the fly at run-time based on the user profile. The Web Automation Engine supports DSML connections to all major directories including those from IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun/Netscape. In addition to the core product components, companies can purchase Bowstreet service suites to speed development to even faster rates and the highest levels of trouble-free server performance. --The Management Suite includes features for reporting, failover, restart, and application management. --The Advanced Development Suite includes functionality for developing Web sites, including quality assurance, version control, code tracking and Builders, which automate the construction of code. Bowstreet Web Automation Factory fuels Web Services Revolution The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory is the first tangible contribution to computing's fourth epoch, the Web Services Revolution, in which readily available Web-resident software components will execute business processes for users. The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times on Sept. 14 heralded the dawn of this revolution, saying, "Software is increasingly becoming a Web-based service whose main goal is to hasten the spread of electronic commerce over the Internet." In the Web Services Revolution, software development as we know it will change. Increasingly, the Internet will host a new breed of platform-neutral units of functionality that will find users and machines that need them and execute important business processes. Examples of these Web services include shipping an overnight order, getting product information, preparing lease terms, credit card payment, checking a map, querying inventory, billing, micropayments, translation and more. Today, the only way to extend such services to customers and partners is slow, expensive custom-coded applications, which often can't work across the Internet. Packaging, pricing and availability The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory 1.0 has been shipping to customers since September 1999. It is currently available through Bowstreet's direct sales force and soon will be available through selected systems integrators. The product is sold on a subscription or perpetual license basis starting at around $250,000. Bowstreet also offers professional services (job) professional services - A department of a supplier providing consultancy and programming manpower for the supplier's products. to assist companies in developing, deploying and managing large Web programs. JumpStart Edition of the Web Automation Factory available for free Bowstreet is giving away a version of the product, called the JumpStart Edition, to qualified businesses and software professionals at no cost. The JumpStart Edition will enable these users to create custom Web sites and publish Web services for a small number of partners on the Web. System Requirements To be used efficiently, all computer software needs certain hardware components or other software resources to be present on a computer system. These pre-requisites are known as (computer) system requirements and are often used as a guideline as opposed to an absolute rule. The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory runs on the Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows See Windows. (operating system) Microsoft Windows - Microsoft's proprietary window system and user interface software released in 1985 to run on top of MS-DOS. Widely criticised for being too slow (hence "Windoze", "Microsloth Windows") on the machines available then. NT server operating systems See network operating system. . It requires one of these directory services: Netscape Directory Server, IBM SecureWay or Novell NDS See eDirectory. NDS - Netware Directory Services . The Bowstreet Web Automation Factory will also be available for Microsoft Active Directory and Oracle Directory Server. About Bowstreet Bowstreet, the leader in mass customization of business-to-business e-commerce, is eradicating the major bottleneck to the adoption of e-commerce by dramatically reducing the enormous cost and complexity of building, managing and linking B2B Web sites. Founded in January 1998, Bowstreet was ranked as one of the top e-commerce start-ups in the country at the recent Enterprise Outlook Conference, and has raised $27.6 million from five leading venture capital firms Name Location Founding date Managing Partners/Directors Specialty Capital managed 5AM Ventures Menlo Park, CA; Waltham, MA 2002 John Diekman, PhD (managing partner), Scott Rocklage, PhD (managing partner), Andrew Schwab (managing partner) life sciences $200M [1] : Charles River Charles River River, eastern Massachusetts, U.S. The longest river wholly in the state, it flows into Boston Bay after a course of about 80 mi (130 km). Navigable for about 7 mi (11 km), its estuary separates the cities of Boston and Cambridge. Ventures, Integral Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Matrix Partners and Pequot Capital Management. For more information, visit www.bowstreet.com or call 603.436.9100. |
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