This time it is Bowstreet, Inc.

Portal market consolidation process is still going on. Acquisitions are becoming daily news in portal arena. Seeing the heavily distributed market, big vendors are fighting hard to gain more and more market. This time it is the turn of Bowstreet. So the news is - IBM acquired Bowstreet, Inc. to consolidate itself in portal and collaboration space. Bowstreet's portlet factory was the leading tool for portal based application integration. Application integration is a major challenge in portal implementation. IBM's acquisition of Bowstreet will help IBM in integrating WebSphere Portal with backend applications like PeopleSoft, SAP, and Databases etc. Bowsteet Portlet Factory's collaborative features will also support IBM WorkPlace, which is IBM's visualization of collaborative portal.

I am personally not much impressed by Bowsteet Portlet Factory product. It is complex in terms of development, installation, configuration and maintenance (in other words everything). It is the main feature ;-) that makes it perfectly fit into the IBM's kitty. IBM is follower of the philosophy which says – create complex products which are hard to install, configure and maintain and then sell your services on top of it. Which can be the better company than IBM to acquire Bowstreet? Bowstreet had also licensed its portlet factory to various vendors including big vendors like Oracle. It would be interesting to see what will be the impact of this acquisition on such vendors. What is your opinion?

Check the press release and let me know your opinion.

Comments

  1. Anonymous11:08 AM

    So if Bowstreet is not the answer, then what portlet development tool would you recommend? Which ones are AJAX enabled? What if you're not Java based, but MS .NET?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:14 AM

    How do you rate current portals in terms of performance,usability,maitanince,cost etc..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:00 AM

    interested to read your position on Bowstreet. My company has not yet purchased the factory product but we have undertaken some degree of study and spoken to various bowstreet companies (large multinationals) who are more than pleased with the product.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8:00 PM

    I used Bowstreet for WebSphere portlet development. It takes some time to learn the Bowstreet development methodology, but the time and effort paid off in the end.

    Unfortunately, the sale of Bowstreet to IBM means the excellent customer support, tutorials, and Bowstreet Discussion Forums are nowhere to be found. Without the support, forums, and tutorials, I will no longer build portlets with Bowsteet Factory.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous8:00 PM

    I used Bowstreet for WebSphere portlet development. It takes some time to learn the Bowstreet development methodology, but the time and effort paid off in the end.

    Unfortunately, the sale of Bowstreet to IBM means the excellent customer support, tutorials, and Bowstreet Discussion Forums are nowhere to be found. Without the support, forums, and tutorials, I will no longer build portlets with Bowsteet Factory.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous6:44 AM

    Bowstreet, nowadays known as Websphere Portlet Factory, is very easy to learn. The whole concept of auto generation is in my opinion very successful. The only downside to it is the installation/configuration, but hey.. it’s IBM :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous6:41 AM

    Just to add to discussion , i have been using porlet factory and the advantages of this tool is

    Developer need not know java coding (unless he uses LJO).
    Rapid application Developement
    But the draw back is debugging , it is very hard to debug application and lot junks of code is bundled in to war file , it is advisable to learn about best practices at begining of usage.
    Thanks
    Praveen

    ReplyDelete

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