Bowstreet Welcomes Microsoft to Web Services Revolution and Supports Microsoft.NET in Bowstreet's 'Business Webs' Product Line.

Business/Technology Editors

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 22, 2000

Bowstreet's vendor-neutral solutions can link all XML-based web

services to quickly connect businesses together on-the-fly

Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) strategy - Microsoft.NET, announced today - further validates Bowstreet's (www.bowstreet.com) pioneering vision, conceived in 1998, that web services - specifically, dynamic combinations of web services called "business webs" - will dramatically reshape the economy and enable plug-and-play e-business. Microsoft's public endorsement of Extensible Markup Language (XML) web services - the latest milestone in a revolution that has businesses worldwide converting their core competencies to digitized services that can be shared over the Internet - will mean that thousands more developers and integrators will begin the transformation process of their traditional business software into next generation e-business services that can be leveraged by Bowstreet's automated solutions.

Microsoft's announcement coincides with the shipment of the Bowstreet(TM) Business Web Factory 2 (see related Bowstreet announcement today), an XML infrastructure platform for publishing, combining, managing and deploying any and all XML-based web services, regardless of platform. The Bowstreet Business Web Factory 2 is available today and already in use by a number of blue chip enterprise customers, among them international insurance and financial services giants AIG (NYSE: AIG) and MetLife (NYSE: MET), General Electric (NYSE: GE), CrossMark, MoneyStar, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) and S3 (Nasdaq: SIII). The Business Web Factory 2 complements Microsoft.NET by providing "out of the box" assembly and mass-customization of Microsoft-based web services that use the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Microsoft's XML vocabulary that allows COM objects to communicate over the Internet.

Bowstreet is the leading independent vendor that can bring together web services compatible with schema and protocols from Microsoft, Sun (Nasdaq: SUNW), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP) and other technology vendors to seamlessly automate, mass-customize, link and scale an unlimited number of web services as quickly as they are created by businesses.

"By accelerating the available inventory of web services, Microsoft.NET fuels our vision of the Internet Economy as a web of interconnected businesses, or business webs," said Frank Moss, co-chairman and co-founder of Bowstreet, a leading provider of XML infrastructure for business-to-business (B2B) web marketplaces. "As customers and developers create web services, Bowstreet can help businesses rapidly find, combine, mass-customize and automate web services to build business webs that fluidly and easily connect customers, suppliers and partners."

Bowstreet: The "Switzerland" of web services

With its platform-neutral Business Web Factory and Business Web Exchange (online June 26), Bowstreet is playing a vendor-neutral role in advancing web services. Web services are application components that reside on the Internet. They have XML interfaces and carry out discrete business processes such as quoting stock prices, billing, setting up online auctions, reserving rooms, loaning money, providing the "shopping cart" process, language translation, displaying patient records and more. Bowstreet was the first company to recognize the importance of web services and act on it commercially. In 1998, the company announced the first software architecture for deploying and managing web services across vendor platforms. In 1999 Bowstreet shipped the first commercial product, the Business Web Factory, enabling companies to develop mass-customized business relationships for linking their customers, vendors and business partners on the Internet.

"Bowstreet and Microsoft are two companies leading the movement to web services," said GartnerGroup's David Smith, vice president and research director, Internet Strategies Service. "The Microsoft.NET announcement, similar to Bowstreet's vision, underpins the future of web services."

"The web services revolution frees business processes from the constraints of software and hardware. Customers, a new generation of pure-play web services vendors and traditional software developers are all rushing to create web services for this reason. We believe there will soon be more web services than web pages, and we are ready to help customers participate in this shift in e-business," asserts Bob Crowley, Bowstreet's president and CEO.

About Bowstreet

Bowstreet provides the XML infrastructure designed to transform the World Wide Web from a collection of static web sites into a fluid web of interconnected businesses called "business webs." These dynamic and highly customized B2B marketplaces enable companies to sell new products and services, create new channels of distribution and develop new business models at a fraction of the time and cost of today's approaches. Bowstreet's patent-pending product, the Bowstreet Business Web Factory, and a robust Internet community, the Bowstreet Business Web Exchange, are designed to enable companies to form instant B2B connections, create richer offerings for existing customers and enable line-of-business managers to take complete control of e-business without technical help. For more information, visit www.bowstreet.com or call 603-559-1900.

Bowstreet is a trademark of Bowstreet.com Inc. All other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.