ATG Cements Ties

At its annual user conference here last week, Art Technology Group tried to underscore its commitment to channel partners and hardware vendors.

ATG CEO Jeet Singh says that alliances between platform providers such as ATG and hardware vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are yielding "a lot more activity on the sales front."

'We're starting to see much more interest (in our products) from hardware partners,' says ATG CEO Jeet Singh.

Singh says 85 percent of its deals involve channel partners.

Doug Kaewert, vice president of Sun's Developer Network Group, says ATG and Sun have more than 600 customers in common. The companies plan to expand their joint marketing, sales and support activities, he says.

Sun and ATG also plan to fund a testing center at ATG's Cambridge, Mass., site, where partners and customers can work with the companies' engineers to prototype ATG applications running on Sun systems.

Meanwhile, HP plans to sell a package consisting of ATG's Dynamo and HP-UX 11.0. HP also plans to integrate Dynamo with its OpenView network management suite.

Systems integration partner PricewaterhouseCoopers says it stands to reap benefits as ATG forges joint sales and marketing relationships with HP, Sun and other IT kingpins,companies with which they typically have established ties.

"Let's say a large percentage of ATG customers will choose [Sun or HP]," says Vineet Garg, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers' CRM practice and global director of the firm's alliance with ATG. When that happens, "we have an opportunity to play as a systems integrator," he says.

The hardware provider then can influence other aspects of an e-business project, he says.

"A closer relationship between us and these hardware vendors would allow us to get to market ahead of the curve," Garg says.