Bowstreet Delivers the Next Breakthrough in Web Services: Packaged E-business Solutions; The First 'Killer App' for Web Services: Next-Generation Portals.

Business/Technolgy Editors

LYNNFIELD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 23, 2001

Bowstreet (www.bowstreet.com) today unveiled the first packaged web services solutions for e-business. Web services is the next-generation computing model being embraced by Global 2000 companies and technology industry leaders including Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Bowstreet's first web services-based packaged solutions - Business Web Portal Solutions - enable businesses to achieve massive economies of scale in all their e-business initiatives. Bowstreet plans to introduce other web services-based packaged solutions in the future.

"Bowstreet's Business Web Portals bring web services into the mainstream, and will do for web services what Lotus 1-2-3 did for the PC and SAP did for client/server," says Frank Moss, Bowstreet co-founder and chairman. "With Bowstreet's web services-based solutions, organizations no longer have to pour the wet cement of hard-wired applications over their e-businesses."

Bowstreet's Business Web Portals are built on the Bowstreet(TM) Business Web Factory, the industry's first web services automation system. Business Web Portals can rapidly automate the creation of portals for externalizing enterprise information, eCRM, syndicated storefronts, corporate intranets, partner extranets and supply chain collaboration. These solutions enable non-technical business people to design, deploy and change portals with minimal help from IT. Businesses can thus move their goals for the Internet from the drawing board into production. These goals include making employees more productive, supply chains more integrated and collaborative, and businesses multi-channel. (See related press release, "Bowstreet introduces next-generation portal solution.")

The Bowstreet Business Web Factory models, dynamically assembles, automatically changes, and mass customizes web services, dramatically reducing the cost and complexity involved in creating e-business applications. The Business Web Factory and Business Web Portals together create an application environment where IT and business people can collaborate to create 10s, 100s or even 1000s of customized variations of portals and other applications for employees, partners and customers.

With Bowstreet, businesses can achieve the mass-customization and economies of scale advantages required today, while ensuring compliance with forthcoming web services platforms. The vendor-neutral, standards-based Business Web Factory will work with and leverage the services of Microsoft.NET, Sun ONE, Oracle Dynamic Services, IBM Web Services, and/or HP E-Speak as they become available. The Business Web Factory and Business Web Portals include all the infrastructure and core services needed today to run web services applications in a production environment.

Achieving e-business economies of scale

Bowstreet replaces one-off applications hard-coded by programmers with services dynamically assembled at run-time based on instructions from business people. Because of the inherent reusability of e-business applications and components created with Bowstreet, businesses' savings levels actually increase with each additional e-business initiative they deploy - in other words, economies of scale.

Bowstreet is able to deliver economies of scale because of a software breakthrough - parametric automation technology - that enables re-use of e-business assets and mass-customization by non-technical business people.

The Business Web Factory represents business processes - including legacy applications - as web services and stores them in a directory as reusable components. IT people then design models of e-business solutions - for example, a customer portal - by specifying and combining links to these services. Once the models are created, business people can customize them for many different audiences, adapt them for new uses, embed them in other applications, and update them with new functionality, simply by changing the models' parameters. Each new customized solution (the output created by modifying a model) dynamically assembles and updates itself at run-time, eliminating the need for piles of programming code maintained by IT and dramatically reducing cost and time to market.

About Bowstreet

Bowstreet, recognized as a leader in web services by industry analysts, enables businesses to transform themselves from hard-wired enterprises into fluid, purpose-driven "business webs." Bowstreet's pioneering web services automation system, the Bowstreet(TM) Business Web Factory and Business Web Portal Solutions (including enterprise information sharing, eCRM, syndicated storefronts, corporate intranets, partner extranets and supply chain collaboration), brings massive economies of scale to e-business. Bowstreet empowers IT people to create reusable application models that business people can then "mass-customize" and manage - without programming - for customers, partners and employees. More information may be found at www.bowstreet.com or by calling 781-586-7100.

Bowstreet is a trademark of Bowstreet, Inc. All other company names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or owners.