Bowstreet Launches Enterprise Portal Solutions; All the Advantages of Custom-Built Software are Now Available in Pre-Packaged Solutions.

TEWKSBURY, Mass. -- Bowstreet(TM), the leading provider of application development tools for portals, today introduced the Bowstreet Enterprise Portal Solutions, a set of adaptive, portal-based composite applications for improving employee, partner, and customer productivity. The first suite of the Enterprise Portal Solutions, the Workforce Management Suite, includes employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS) applications for IBM WebSphere Portal and Workplace. Bowstreet Enterprise Solutions come complete with pre-packaged portlets, browser-based configuration tools, and Bowstreet's award-winning Portlet Factory technology, which makes it easy to modify and extend the suite to meet unique business requirements.

The Workforce Management Suite improves employee productivity and reduces overhead costs by automating a broad range of people and paper-intensive HR activities, such as updating personnel records, requesting vacation time, and reviewing a job applicant's status. Up until now, WebSphere customers that wanted these benefits had to custom build HR self-service applications. Most companies have found these handcrafted solutions costly to maintain, difficult to change, and hard to scale. Bowstreet's Workforce Management Suite overcomes these issues by providing turnkey solutions that offer unprecedented flexibility and configurability, which significantly reduces the total cost of ownership, provides a high degree of user personalization, and dramatically reduces customization costs.

Bowstreet's adaptive, portal-based solutions achieve greater variability by leveraging profile-enabled components and customizable configuration tools that enable business users to easily and quickly modify applications to meet unique presentation, process flow, and data visibility requirements - at a fraction of the time and cost it takes today.

Bowstreet's portal solutions also address the need to connect to multiple backend data sources. According to a META Group study, the idea that a company can exist only with SAP is a myth. The study cites that even the best SAP customers still need to connect, on average, to 25 non-SAP systems. A typical scenario is where personnel data will reside in one application, such as SAP, and benefits data will reside in another system, such as a Domino database. To meet this challenge, Bowstreet's Enterprise Portal Solutions ship with wizard-driven connectors that automate the process of pointing portlets at multiple data sources.

"One of the barriers to successful portal initiatives is the time and complexity of creating high-impact applications that connect to backend systems at the proper level of granularity. Bowstreet Enterprise Portal Solutions provide a way to achieve rapid benefits in many companies' key focus areas," said David Marshak, senior vice president, Patricia Seybold Group. "And by building on Bowstreet's leadership in areas such as standards support and Web Services, these Solutions can be quickly implemented and customized for multiple environments."

"Bowstreet has been building robust portal solutions for Global 2000 companies for two years now," said Michael George, president and CEO, Bowstreet. "Portal solutions require an unprecedented level of variability to accommodate multiple user roles, geographic differences, and disparate data sources. To meet these requirements, companies must infuse flexibility into their portal applications and infrastructure, enabling adaptive solutions that can be rapidly configured and dynamically changed to meet new or changing business processes. The more agile the software, the less time and money companies need to spend on maintenance, and the more responsive IT can be to business needs."

Several customers have already deployed employee and customer-facing portals using Bowstreet's Portlet Factory tools and technology. Cardinal Health System uses an employee portal that enables physicians to access critical data, such as patient, scheduling, and pharmaceutical information. UNICCO, one of North America's largest facility services outsourcing companies, deployed a time entry application, which allows 200 site managers to enter, track, and manage the schedules of 7,000 mobile workers. DuPont deployed a distributor portal that provides resellers with quick, convenient access to sales, marketing, and self-service tools, which are customized based on individual partner status.

Availability

The first release of the Workforce Management Suite will be available in mid-December. An overview and demonstration of the Suite will be presented during a web seminar with Forrester's Nate Root on Tuesday, November 16th, at 1:00 pm ET. For more details or to register for this event, visit www.bowstreet.com.

About Bowstreet

Bowstreet is the leading provider of application development tools for portals, and is leading the industry transition to pre-packaged composite applications and distributed web-based services. Bowstreet-built applications are all powered by Bowstreet's proven Factory technology, which provides a highly flexible application development framework for assembling data and processes from disparate systems into dynamic applications that can adapt, on-demand, to unique and constantly changing business requirements. Solutions powered by Bowstreet Factory technology can be deployed in a portal, on the web, on a wireless device, or distributed as a service. Bowstreet technology is used by industry leading companies, including Amerijet, Allmerica, Cardinal Health System, Caterpillar, Cisco, Crossrail, DuPont, Fidelity Information Services, Gillette, ImClone, IT Factory, John Crane, Kroger, Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Mutual, Ogilvy & Mather, Sheetz, Tufts Health Care, UNICCO, and Vormittag. Bowstreet is headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts and has offices in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and London. www.bowstreet.com.

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