IBM snaps up Bowstreet

Computer giant IBM has snapped up Bowstreet, a provider of high-end portal software founded by industry veteran Frank Moss. The Bowstreet buy will augment IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology. The SOA idea is intended to deliver software components, flexibly, as a service to users, rather than as monolithic, all-encompassing packages.

The deal is also the culmination of a blossoming relationship between the two companies. During the past three years, Bowstreet’s software has been used with IBM’s Rational technology to build portal applications for 100 joint customers. IBM claims that using both tools together can speed up such projectsm making them between two and 12 times faster.

Bowstreet’s software enables organisations to build sophisticated portals and ‘portlets’, integrated with a wide variety of systems, including SAP enterprise-resource planning (ERP) software, PeopleSoft ERP, the Lotus collaboration platform, EMC Software’s Documentum enterprise-content management software and Hyperion Essbase. It also supports many other third-party portal services, including IBM WebSphere and Oracle 10g.

The deal is the latest in a string of mergers and acquisitions in the software sector, which is increasingly being carved up by a handful of major vendors, led by Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

Bowstreet has had a rollercoaster history. Starting out as an e-commerce software provider in the late 1990s, it morphed into an integration and web-services company in the early years of the new millennium, before finally switching to portal software. Early on, it was lavished with funding of more than $140M, although it is unclear what, if any, return those early investors will receive from the sale.

Frank Moss made his name and reputation as the founder of Tivoli Systems, a systems management software supplier that he sold to IBM just over ten years ago.