An early Web services pioneer, Bowstreet has refocused more on tangible market opportunities as Web services become part of many vendors' strategies.

Core Topic Internet Platforms and Web Services: Web Services and Dynamic Business Webs Key Issues What are the strategies of the leading vendors in Web services? What are Web services, and how is this approach different from previous approaches? Bowstreet Headquarters: Portsmouth, New Hampshire Web Location: www.bowstreet.com Founded: January 1998 Ownership: Private Financial Data: $140 million invested by venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins, Matrix, Charles River; by corporate investors, such as Oracle, AIX, Dell, GE, Novell and AOL Time Warner; and by various investment funds Strategic Partners: BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, IBM, HP Interwoven, Netegrity, Documentum, WebMethods, Actional, SeeBeyond

A privately held company, Bowstreet has used and pioneered Web services concepts as a major part of its Business Web Factory strategy. As Bowstreet's flagship product, Business Web Factory enables enterprises to automate the creation, assembly and maintenance of composite Web applications for what the company has termed "business webs," or highly flexible automated business relationships (see "The Future of Web Services: Dynamic Business Webs," M-13-3593).

Bowstreet's product makes use of a concept called parametric technology. At a very simple level, developers build parametric models that assemble applications "on the fly." By providing different inputs to the model (parameters stored in directories or passed through URLs), variations of the application are produced without new coding. This technology has been heavily used in the CAD/CAM space to help engineers deal with the multiplicity of changes that one simple change can cause. Applying this concept to software and Web sites is what makes Bowstreet's approach unique. Web services — in conjunction with this parametric technology — have given Bowstreet a great deal of visibility in the industry.

As an early Web services leader with real products and customers, Bowstreet has built significant partnerships as well. Early on, in 1998, Bowstreet partnered with Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft to forge some of the standards around XML directory access and Directory Services Markup Language (DSML). In addition, as a result of dynamically building Web sites from disparate elements, and its underlying proprietary builder component approach (i.e., Builders), Bowstreet was quick to adopt XML and evangelize emerging Web services concepts. Now, with Web services technologies becoming mainstream, the company is delivering more pragmatic market solutions to increase traction and ensure continued cash flow.

Beyond Web Services
Bowstreet's focus has always been on Web services. However, Bowstreet has recently begun to offer additional options, called Automators, on top of its platform. Automators leverage Web services and further accelerate the adoption of the company's technologies as applied to content management, forms and portals. The company is also well-positioned to enter an emerging market for integrated service environments (ISEs), with its Web services production platforms (WSPPs) segment. Consistent with Gartner's belief that few vendors will be strictly "Web services vendors," Bowstreet's broadening of its strategies indicates that it will complement its Web service technology with its own blend of added value.

Portals
Bowstreet has not traditionally been a portal vendor, but it does provide a malleable platform that can be used to build almost anything. The company often ran into portal products in the field and found them to be an appropriate place to demonstrate its technology. Bowstreet has subsequently won multiple Fortune 500 accounts and has recently released a product framework that more closely resembles a typical portal offering and targets what Gartner defines as the "10/90" portal space (see "The 90/10-10/90 Rule for Portal Deployment," SPA-14-5861). This new offering will enable it to compete better in the enterprise portal market.

For portals, Gartner believes it comes down to the "build vs. buy" trade-off. On the one side is the off-the-shelf product that is easy to implement and inexpensive. This type of product will provide only a certain amount of functionality and will have limited flexibility. On the other side is the full-featured, more flexible, yet relatively difficult-to-use and expensive product. Gartner places Bowstreet's enterprise portal framework in the latter category.

Bowstreet will come in and build the portal, or users can build it themselves using Bowstreet's product. Although neither option provides the benefits of an off-the-shelf product, enterprises will be in better position to react to changes and different scenarios by using approaches such as the more-customizable Bowstreet portal framework.

Partnerships With Application Server Vendors
Originally positioned as a complete server platform vendor, Bowstreet has recently repositioned itself primarily as a partner with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server vendors (notably BEA Systems and IBM). By partnering with application server vendors rather than continuing with its own technology, Bowstreet has made questions such as whether it has its own application server or which one it supports obsolete. Bowstreet supports all of the important ones and has a keen interest in expanding that to include Microsoft .NET.

ISEs and WSPPs
ISEs are the next target focus for Bowstreet, and Gartner believes the company is well-positioned to have a positive impact on this emerging market. ISEs encompass the combined effect of Web services and services-oriented development of applications (SODA) concepts in the development and deployment of Web-services-based applications. WSPP is a subset of ISEs focused more on higher-value-added products and platforms.

Strengths:

• Early leader
• Real products and customers
• Parametric technology