ATG Expands On Porting Plan

Art Technology Group this week expects to unveil plans to port its entire e-business platform to Java-based application servers other than its own, a move industry watchers say signals consolidation in that market.

ATG is slated to unveil Dynamo 5.5 and ATG Enterprise Portal Suite, which will help solution providers deploy and manage portal solutions, says Peter Mahoney, senior director of product marketing at ATG. They should ship by the end of this quarter, he says.

Dynamo 5.5, with new personalization and enterprise application integration features, also will be ported to app servers from BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and iPlanet, a Sun-AOL/Netscape alliance, by the middle of next year, Mahoney says.

This move comes on the heels of last week's announcement that ATG will port its e-CRM, personalization and commerce applications to the same servers by the end of the year. Currently, ATG's applications run only on its own Dynamo app server.

Like other app servers, Dynamo is compatible with Java 2 Enterprise Edition, the de facto standard for enterprise-scale Java solutions. Because of this standard, many observers predict current market leaders BEA and IBM eventually will dominate, preventing smaller vendors from competing on implementation alone. In anticipation of this, those vendors are developing applications that will run on BEA and IBM app servers, says Randy Heffner, director of application architecture at Giga Information Group.

As competition narrows in the app server market, the portal space has seen a spate of recent activity, with IBM, BEA and now ATG adding portal products.

Vendors want to become one-stop shops for solution providers, says Chris Kraybill, principal technologist for Blackstone Technology Group, a systems integrator in San Francisco. "[The portal] is another product [a customer] would have to go out and buy, which is why [vendors] all want to have it in their own suite of products," he says.