IBM Buys Web Services Pioneer Bowstreet

The recent purchase of Bowstreet, who tried to ride the wave of web services and later service oriented architecture, demonstrates how hard it really is to succeed in enterprise software in general but especially in software development tools. They raised $140 million in venture capital, had some of the best minds working there, good leadership and decent strategy, and they end up having about $10 million in sales per year to show for it.

Given the state of open source development tools, it’s hard to see how anyone but the big players can stay in business in that sector.