IBM acquires Bowstreet

IBM announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Bowstreet in its quest to tightly integrate the portal development tools of its longtime partner into its service-oriented architecture strategy.

Bowstreet, based in Tewksbury, Mass., is expected to have its Portlet Factory software integrated into IBM's software products in the second half of next year. Until then, IBM will continue to offer the Portlet Factory software with its WebSphere Portal tools.

Bowstreet's tools are designed to offer developers a "wizard" to aid them in creating an application that presents information from a single window, which draws upon several other applications. For example, a customer uses Bowstreet's tools to bring corporate applications, documents, databases and other information into an integrated portal application.

The acquisition is designed to ease the transfer of the information into a WebSphere Portal via Bowstreet's tools.

Bowstreet has been an IBM partner for the past four years, upgrading its portal tools and offering to work more closely with WebSphere portal customers. The two companies share about 100 customers.

Bowstreet in the late 1990s originally sold a line of high-end Web services development tools. In 2002, the company focused its product efforts specifically on tools to build portal applications, or portlets. And the following year, it signed a deal with IBM, in which Big Blue resold Bowstreet's Portlet Factory.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica contributed to this report.