Tech Shout!

The world’s largest information technology company IBM has attained Bowstreet Inc., a Massachusetts-based provider of portal-based tools and technology that facilitates companies to bring together corporate applications, documents, databases and other enterprise information into a single, integrated portal application, without requiring significant technical skills.

IBM said that by bringing together assorted data and information into a single “composite” application, businesses can easily share and connect their data with customers, partners and suppliers, which increases the amount of collaboration and organizational productivity.

The acquisition of Bowstreet will further enhance IBM’s strategy around service oriented architectures (SOA), a standards-based framework that allows enterprises to effectively integrate data and applications with customers, partners and suppliers. Bowstreet will enable customers to easily combine a wide variety of pre-existing data and enterprise applications seamlessly with their WebSphere Portal environments and control the benefits of SOA architecture.

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.”

Michael George, Bowstreet CEO said, “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.” He added, “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.”