Business services provider Winholesale chose Bowstreet Portlet Factory, and IBM WebSphere Portal, to provide portlet development providing role-based access to the company's financial information. Winholesale decided to use Bowstreet's Portlet Factory in order to have continued access to key company data, residing on mainframe and AS/400 systems, while its IT staff migrated to a J2EE environment.

Steve Ricketts, VP of marketing at Bowstreet, said, "Portals are an ideal way to present views into critical business data and improve operational efficiencies. Bowstreet allows companies, even those without J2EE experts on staff, to start reaping the benefits of their portals immediately with portlets designed to evolve and change as their needs do."

Unlike portlets created with RAD or "clipping" tools, Bowstreet-powered portlets are organic J2EE applications, able to grow with a company while it transitions systems, and after. With Bowstreet's Portlet Factory, executives at Winholesale will be able to access financial data during the time it takes to move to a J2EE environment. The seamless access to data allows Winholesale to monitor company activity without any "lag" time between system changes.

Bill Swatling, IBM WebSphere portal product manager, said, "The industry continues to demand total solutions for building faster and better e-business applications. By arming Winholesale with an integrated solution, we are helping them leverage business-imperative data."

IBM sells Bowstreet Portlet Factory along with WebSphere Portal. Bowstreet's award-winning automation framework and reusable software components allows developers to build adaptive portlets, Web services, and J2EE Web applications as either stand-alone applications, or integrated into an existing infrastructure. More than 65 companies use the Bowstreet framework, including Bureau Veritas, Cardinal Health System, Cisco, Crossrail, DuPont, Fidelity Information Services, GM, John Crane, Kroger, Northwestern Mutual, Sun Microsystems, UNICCO, and Wackenhut. Bowstreet is headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts and has offices in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and London. www.bowstreet.com.