Bow Street Takes On Customized Extranets

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May 03, 1999 (12:00 AM EDT)

Bow Street Software's Frank Moss is betting big that companies need new technology to bring their sales and distribution channels to the Web.

As companies try to make this move, the next big thing, according to Moss, "they will discover very, very quickly that there's a tremendous bottleneck with the current hardwired, N-tier technology."

With Bow Street, Moss, former chairman of Tivoli Systems, said he hopes to offer software that will combine directory smarts with profiling to take the pain out of customized extranets. "As businesses turn themselves into service providers, and even brick-and-mortar companies will have to view themselves this way, they must be adept at generating extranet offerings for thousands of relationships," Moss said. "If they do that today, they run into costs that are greater than the GNP."

Moss joined forces with Jack Serfass, former CEO of Preferred Systems, and founded Bow Street with an eye on providing Windows NT- and Solaris-based software that will let companies more easily customize such extranets.

The idea of leveraging directories such as Novell's Directory Services, IBM's SecureWay, and Microsoft's Active Directory, as well as XML, is sound, analysts said. The software is due this summer. Pricing is not set.

Companies now have hundreds, if not thousands, of partners each with its own requirements, processes, products and contacts. "They require a very customized relationship. The problem in the past in extranet construction is that everyone gets force-fit into one site or you spend major dollars trying to get customization. It gets kind of gruesome," said Michael Goulde, executive vice president of the Patricia Seybold Group, in Boston.

"Our customers and partners all use this data differently and need it cut different ways.We need technologies that let us automate that process," said David Toth, president and CEO of NetRatings, a Milpitas, Calif.-based market-research company specializing in analyzing Web traffic.

Matt Cain, analyst at The Meta Group, in Stamford, Conn., said because XML tags all data, "you can repurpose it easily and the directory will control who can see what. And, there will be stored preferences for what type of content gets delivered to what type of business partner."