It's been a good year for Bowstreet. The up-and-coming software developer has landed contracts with some high-profile customers, including FedEx, IBM, and Merrill Lynch, for its directory software aimed at online exchanges. And in March, Bowstreet secured $60 million in third-round financing, including an undisclosed stake from database heavyweight Oracle. But at least one customer has trepidation about the Oracle relationship. "It's all good for Oracle, and mostly good for Bowstreet," says John Thompson, president of Crossmark Performance Group, a unit of Piano, Texas-based Crossmark that provides retail-marketing services. Bowstreet's technology, which uses the Extensible Markup Language to create a data store for relationships among objects in an application, is so powerful, Thompson says, that it could replace a database in some applications. "The beauty of what Bowstreet's got is that it works with anybody," he says. "Oracle's investment could curtail what their product could be."
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