ATG Hitches Wagon To IBM For Application Development

Executives at ATG, Cambridge, Mass., also said the company will help its own customers transition from ATG's Dynamo J2EE application development platform to WebSphere and provide support and services to customers for running ATG commerce and self-service applications on IBM's software.

Under the terms of the deal--a move CRN predicted in March--ATG will preintegrate its ATG Commerce, ATG Relationship Management, ATG Publishing and ATG Self-Service with WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Studio development tools and WebSphere MQ integration software, ATG executives said.

An ATG spokesman said other ATG products, such as ATG Portal, might be included in future bundles with IBM WebSphere software.

ATG also will provide special licensing to customers that want to transition from running these applications on ATG Dynamo to IBM WebSphere, according to ATG.

ATG's move comes as little surprise to observers familiar with the company's gradual exit from the stand-alone application server business, which has been dominated by San Jose, Calif.-based BEA Systems and IBM, Armonk, N.Y., in the past several years.

Earlier this year, CRN reported that ATG was planning to leverage its relationship with IBM by aligning its products with IBM's application development platform and migrating existing ATG Dynamo customers to WebSphere.

In July 2001, ATG began tweaking its personalization and CRM software to run on not only the Dynamo application server, but on competing application servers from IBM, BEA and Sun Microsystems.