Bowstreet announces free, open source Java-based toolkit

[Ann Kelly <akelly@bowstreet.com>]

Bowstreet's 'jUDDI' adds punch to B2B connectivity 

Industry's first implementation of broad industry-initiated standard to link
e-businesses to the 'Yellow Pages' of B2B web services

PORTSMOUTH, NH, October 18, 2000 -- Bowstreet (www.bowstreet.com), a leading
provider of business web automation solutions for plug-and-play e-commerce,
today made it easier for companies to create partnership connections over
the Internet. Bowstreet announced one of the industry's first
implementations of UDDI, an emerging standard for finding and using any
company's web-based services. The implementation, available immediately,
comes after Ariba (Nasdaq: ARBA), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (Nasdaq:
MSFT) unveiled a draft specification of the standard. Bowstreet has
introduced jUDDI as free, open source software that is available for anyone
to use. 

UDDI - which stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration -
is designed to make it easy for businesses to create partnerships and new
business models using platform-neutral application components called web
services. The initiative will create a distributed registry, or Yellow
Pages, for publishing, finding and using web services that companies wish to
offer to the marketplace.

Bowstreet's jUDDI (pronounced "Judy") is an open source Java-based toolkit
for developers to make their applications UDDI-ready. jUDDI-enabled
applications will be able to look up a web service in a UDDI registry. A
retail chain, for example, could use the toolkit to jUDDI-enable its online
catalog. With jUDDI, the catalog could call another company's shopping cart
and a third company's transaction web service, creating an instant web-based
store. Companies will eventually create many connections like this, spawning
"business webs," or dynamic collections of businesses, on a massive scale.

Bowstreet will incorporate jUDDI technology into its products, including the
Bowstreet(tm) Business Web Factory. With the jUDDI-enabled Business Web
Factory, customers will be able to point and click to search, select and
acquire web services from the UDDI registry. Customers will then be able to
combine these web services, incorporate them with web services within
companies and in other directories across the web, and customize and
proliferate the results - all without programming. This process automates
the creation of business webs, an emerging business model for 21st-century
commerce.

"Harnessing web services and simplifying intercompany eBusiness is what
Bowstreet is about, and our jUDDI toolkit is a natural extension of our
products and services," said James Tauber, Bowstreet's director of XML
technology. "jUDDI will be the key to UDDI Business Registries, and the
Factory will let companies make best use of the contents."

jUDDI and UDDI will complement DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) -
the directory services standard launched last year by Bowstreet, IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL)and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. Directories
provide users with a powerful way to manage web services, including web
services published in UDDI registries. Bowstreet sees synergy between DSML
and UDDI and will actively explore a relationship between the two
specifications, according to Tauber, who is chairman of the DSML 2.0 working
group. The jUDDI project is hosted at SourceForge and available as
downloadable software from www.juddi.org.

jUDDI is the latest in a long line of Bowstreet's industry firsts that
advance intercompany interoperability on the Internet. "UDDI, Microsoft's
.NET, HP's e-Speak, ebXML, DSML and a host of other initiatives confirm what
Bowstreet customers already know," said Bob Crowley, Bowstreet's president
and chief executive officer. "They know that plug-and-play e-commerce is
possible and inevitable for the 21st century, because they're doing it."

Bowstreet, a founding advisor to the UDDI initiative, was one of the first
companies to recognize the importance of web services and act on it
commercially. In 1998, the company announced a software architecture for
deploying and managing web services across multiple vendor platforms. In
1999, Bowstreet shipped a commercial product, the Business Web Factory,
enabling companies to develop mass-customized business relationships for
linking their customers, vendors and business partners on the Internet. In
June 2000, the Business Web Factory 2 became a vendor-neutral XML-based
platform to enable on-the-fly assembly and mass-customization of any and all
XML-based web services, including those compatible with software from
Microsoft, Sun (Nasdaq: SUNW), IBM, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP) and others. 

About the Bowstreet Business Web Factory
Bowstreet's Business Web Factory enables companies to dramatically
accelerate B2B e-commerce using business webs, or collections of high-level
web services that come together dynamically on the web to create new
business models. This approach of interconnecting companies in dynamic
business webs is based on the Business Web Factory's foundation in
Extensible Markup Language (XML), a common language of e-commerce, and on
Bowstreet's change automation technology, which enables companies to create
mass-customized, high-level B2B and B2C web services using parametrically
driven, on-the-fly assembly of core web services. The Bowstreet platform
additionally enables companies to maintain their own directories of web
services and to provide managed access to these web services through
firewalls.

About Bowstreet
Bowstreet provides XML infrastructure for plug-and-play e-commerce.
Bowstreet's Business Web Factory and businessweb.com use change automation
technology to create business webs: fluid, interconnected collections of web
services that come together dynamically over the Internet to create entirely
new business models. Bowstreet's pioneering solutions enable companies to
sell new products and services, create new channels of distribution and
develop new business initiatives at a fraction of the time and cost of many
of today's approaches. For more information, visit www.bowstreet.com or call
603-559-1900.

# # #

Bowstreet is a trademark of Bowstreet.com Inc. All other company names and
product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective
companies or owners.

Contact:

Ann Kelly
Bowstreet
603-559-1557
akelly@bowstreet.com

Jeff Aubin
Beaupre & Co.
603-559-5838
jaubin@beaupre.com