IBM Acquires Bowstreet, Inc. to Help Customers Quickly Create Portals that Integrate Existing Business Applications

ARMONK, NY - 20 Dec 2005, IBM today announced the acquisition of Bowstreet, Inc., a Massachusetts-based provider of portal-based tools and technology that helps companies bring together corporate applications, documents, databases and other enterprise information into a single, integrated portal application, without requiring significant technical skills. By bringing together assorted data and information into a single “composite” application, businesses can more easily share and connect their data with customers, partners and suppliers, which increases collaboration and leads to increased organizational productivity.IBM today announced the acquisition of Bowstreet, Inc., a Massachusetts-based provider of portal-based tools and technology that helps companies bring together corporate applications, documents, databases and other enterprise information into a single, integrated portal application, without requiring significant technical skills. By bringing together assorted data and information into a single “composite” application, businesses can more easily share and connect their data with customers, partners and suppliers, which increases collaboration and leads to increased organizational productivity.
Bowstreet will help further IBM’s strategy around service oriented architectures (SOA), a standards-based framework that enables enterprises to more effectively integrate data and applications with customers, partners and suppliers. Bowstreet will enable customers to more easily combine a wide variety of pre-existing data and enterprise applications seamlessly with their WebSphere Portal environments and leverage the benefits of an SOA architecture.

“For a global corporation with offices in many countries it is a challenging task to coordinate all aspects of its business operations. It soon became obvious that we needed a centralized, portal-based framework that would allow groups around the world to easily access and share business data,” said Thomas Berrang, vice president of eBusiness Enabling at Bayer Business Services. “We chose a combined WebSphere Portal and Bowstreet solution to build a secure standardized and adaptable framework. It provides a common user interface and includes tools to create customized workplaces that may integrate all kinds of systems and applications. This solution helped to significantly accelerate processes within the company and increase efficiency, particularly in the area of customer service. Today, employees at Bayer can easily access important information and are thus able to react with greater flexibility to the needs of their customers.”

As more organizations move away from “one size fits all” software, demand for tailored, customizable software has dramatically increased. By adding Bowstreet technology to IBM’s software portfolio, IBM customers can now quickly and easily develop tailored, integrated portal solutions designed to meet the specific business needs of their market or vertical industry. Based on results of more than 100 joint customer engagements over the last three years, customers using Bowstreet technology with IBM Rational software built portal applications between 2 to 12 times faster than when using other portlet tools, drastically reducing development costs and producing business benefits in less time.

“Companies are looking for new ways to combine their various silos of information and applications into a single view that can help them make better business decisions, reduce costs and improve time-to-value,” said Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM’s Workplace, Portal and collaboration business. “We believe the combination of Bowstreet, Rational and IBM WebSphere Portal offer the best in market capability for building and running composite applications. The combination of Bowstreet and WebSphere Portal provides customers with a simple way to blend assorted data and information into a single application, allowing customers to more quickly react to changing business needs and market events, help lower their IT maintenance costs, and more easily tailor business processes to meet their needs,” he added.

“As organizations have to manage an increasing amount of information on multiple and disparate systems, the combination of Bowstreet and WebSphere Portal can make it easier for them to take business information from a variety of sources and quickly assemble composite portal solutions,” said Michael George, Bowstreet CEO. “By combining the integration capabilities of WebSphere Portal with the simplicity, versatility and speed of Bowstreet, IBM is giving customers the ability to quickly and easily build flexible, data-centric portal solutions that maximize the value of their legacy applications and help them better compete.”

About IBM
IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM Software offers a wide range of middleware and operating systems for all types of computing platforms, allowing customers to take full advantage of the on demand era. The fastest way to get more information about IBM software is through the IBM Software home page at http://www.software.ibm.com.

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Jennifer Snyder

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IBM

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