Bowstreet and Its Customers Embrace New UDDI E-Commerce Standards Initiative; Bowstreet Announces Support for UDDI Across Company's Product Line.

Business/Technology Editors

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 6, 2000

Bowstreet (www.bowstreet.com), a leading provider of business web automation solutions for plug-and-play e-commerce, today announced that it will serve as a founding advisor to UDDI, the new e-commerce standards initiative announced today by Ariba (Nasdaq: ARBA), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), and will integrate support for UDDI into the Bowstreet(TM) Business Web Factory and businessweb.com within 90 days of the availability of the specification. Bowstreet customers, who are already leveraging web services using the Business Web Factory to expand into new markets and create scalable new e-business models, also welcomed UDDI.

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) is a web-services registry and standard designed to make it easier for businesses to create partnerships and business models using web services.

Said Robert James, President and COO of eBusiness for leading commercial insurer CNA (NYSE: CNA): "CNA welcomes this announcement as a major milestone in the evolution towards XML-based web services as the currency for eBusiness. The UDDI standard - and others like it that arise in the future - make it easier for companies to publish their core competencies into a common repository and to rapidly locate and retrieve independent web services that they can consume. CNA's adoption of the Bowstreet Business Web Factory enables us to create a vast directory of plug-and-play web services and to embrace the benefits of the UDDI standard. Furthermore, Bowstreet's architecture enables us to embrace other industry standards that develop in the future and embed our eBusiness processes into any platform across the Internet, regardless of the XML schemas or standards underlying them."

Said CROSSMARK Performance Group Vice President Rob Bresnahan: "UDDI and future vendor-sponsored initiatives for web services will increase the strategic value of our Bowstreet solution and our business web strategy. The key to success for an organization is to create a differentiated offering based on its ability to create a unique pattern of workflows and relationships with suppliers and customers. As web services become more available, the greater the opportunity for differentiation when combining these `web functions' in new ways. While most strategies and technologies in use today no longer support the pace of change necessary for the rapid innovation cycles, web services allow organizations to connect and disconnect to new partners and new capabilities at will, creating new business processes. New business processes will lead to innovation, the key to profitability."

Doug Dayhoff, CEO of iProperty.com, which provides an integrated web-based suite of services for real estate professionals, noted: "Web services are transforming the real-estate industry by enabling real estate professionals to provide consumers with a broad range of integrated services, from a multitude of companies, that evolve throughout the home-buying process. By increasing the inventory of web services and enabling easier exchange of services among companies, UDDI should open up additional opportunities for us and our customers. With Bowstreet's Business Web Factory, we are well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities because we have an automated way to connect, deploy and scale web services from multiple sources into customized products delivered across the Net."

"As one of the pioneers of the web services movement and a strong proponent of open standards for business-to-business e-commerce, we enthusiastically applaud the UDDI initiative," said Bob Crowley, Bowstreet's president and chief executive officer. "Customers should greatly benefit from standards that describe the higher-level business functions that web services provide, just as they have benefited from DSML, XML and other current standards for creating, organizing and managing web services. In our advisory role, we bring to the table a high degree of experience with the requirements of companies who need to tap into centralized UDDI registries, along with business webs that supply services to their favored partners and customers."

Bowstreet will enable the Business Web Factory 2 to use UDDI-registered services in creating business webs. The company will provide a set of parametric business web "Builders" in the Business Web Factory that automate the interactions among UDDI registries and set up the service calls to the actual web services stored in the registries. Bowstreet's Builders will go beyond their current understanding of low-level element type definitions (SOAP and other "web service plumbing" issues), to understanding categorizations, cross-service workflow issues, binding policies and other business-level processes - all critical in assembling business webs.

Additionally, businessweb.com (www.businessweb.com), a Bowstreet-sponsored online community, educational site and industry exchange for web services that goes online today, will include UDDI registries of web services as they become available. Access to businessweb.com is free of charge.

Today, the Business Web Factory provides builders for constructing XML-based service calls to web services whose interfaces support SOAP and W3C Schema. Bowstreet customers don't have to know the intricacies of these XML standards in order to construct business webs that make use of this new breed of web services. With the development of UDDI and Bowstreet's planned set of UDDI Interaction Builders, customers will be able to take business web construction and maintenance to the next level of automation.

UDDI will complement DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) - the directory services standard launched last year by Bowstreet, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and the Sun-Netscape Alliance - by encouraging the availability of an inventory of interoperable business-level web services to expedite e-commerce. DSML bridges the gap between directories and XML-based e-business applications, so that businesses can leverage their directory information in connecting multiple companies' business webs. DSML has already gained widespread support in the industry, with vendors such as IBM, Sun, Novell, iPlanet, Critical Path, Radiant Logic and InfoShark incorporating the standard into their e-business product lines.

"Directories provide users with a powerful way to manage web services, including web services published in UDDI registries. We see a lot of synergy between DSML and UDDI, so we will be actively exploring a relationship between the two specifications," said James Tauber, Bowstreet's director of XML technology and chairman of the DSML 2.0 working group.

Bowstreet's Business Web Factory enables companies to dramatically accelerate B2B e-commerce using business webs, or collections of high-level web services that come together dynamically on the web to create new business models. This revolutionary approach of interconnecting companies in dynamic business webs is based on the Business Web Factory's foundation in Extensible Markup Language (XML), the lingua franca of Internet commerce, and on Bowstreet's dynamic automation technology, which enables companies to create mass-customized, high-level B2B and B2C web services using parametrically driven, dynamic assembly of core web services. The Bowstreet platform additionally enables companies to maintain their own directories of web services and to provide managed access to these web services through firewalls.

About Bowstreet

Bowstreet provides the XML infrastructure for plug-and-play e-commerce. Bowstreet's Business Web Factory and web services industry exchange, businessweb.com, automate the creation of business webs: fluid, interconnected collections of web services that come together dynamically over the Internet to create entirely new business models. Bowstreet's pioneering business web automation solutions enable companies to sell new products and services, create new channels of distribution and develop new business initiatives at a fraction of the time and cost of today's approaches. 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 product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or owners.