ATG Ports To WebSphere

Fort Point Partners, a San Francisco e-services company and longtime ATG partner, said it has been working with the beta version of Dynamo for WebSphere since its release last month. George Mathew, Fort Point's vice president of global markets, said the deep integration of ATG's CRM application components with leading application servers from IBM and BEA Systems is especially appropriate for his firm's retail and financial services clients.

"There are a number of customer-facing applications, particularly around personalization scenarios, [for which it really makes sense to use a package that's off the shelf, rather than building from scratch," said Mathew. "It eliminates a lot of integration burdens."

Peter Mahoney, senior director, ATG relationship management, said the ability to consolidate Web infrastructures translates into lower maintenance and integration costs for customers. It also means more affordable CRM programs to build customer loyalty, prompting users to return to Web sites, he said.

ATG's online applications for commerce, portal and relationship management, said Mahoney, are now optimized for IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic. Those products occupy about 75 percent of the application server market, according to new figures from Giga Information Group.

ATG is preparing more editions of Dynamo for application servers from Oracle, Hewlett-Packard's BlueStone product and Sun Microsystems' iPlanet brand. ATG executives have said market conditions will dictate the order in which other editions of Dynamo ship.

ATG calls on experienced partners to integrate software being adapted to leverage intelligence and information already sitting inside their clients' companies, Mahoney said.

"Our customers really want us to be able to support the market-leading application server vendors out there," said Mahoney. "That way, they can protect their investment and avoid getting locked into a single vendor."

For its part, IBM recently stepped up support for its partners by unveiling an initiative to help solution providers develop and deploy Web services on WebSphere. IBM expects the program to draw 150 partners by year's end.