ATG Releases Beta ATG6 Portal, Commerce Apps

Art Technology Group (Nasdaq: ARTG) (ATG) has announced beta release of its latest versions of portal and commerce applications -- ATG6 -- along with three new modules. The company is adding publishing, analytics and search functions to its offering, citing customer requests for single-vendor systems.

Victor Cheng, ATG senior director of commerce, told CRM Buyer Magazine that Johnson & Johnson, Wells Fargo and Alcatel are among the companies currently enrolled in the beta program. The general release version is due out during the fourth quarter of 2002, with more functions to be added in first quarter 2003.

OEM Agreements

Fumi Matsumoto, ATG vice president of technology, told CRM Buyer that two of the new modules are based on OEM agreements with specialty niche leaders. ATG has added search capabilities, based on Autonomy's offering, so that customers do not need to integrate a separate search tool into their commerce and portal applications.

Similarly, ATG partnered with Hyperion to integrate an analytics module.

"This is a tool that many of our customers already were using," said Matsumoto. So, he added, it made sense to take care of the integration in-house and offer the module along with the commerce and portal platforms.

ATG said that the analytics module also will include prebuilt reports and data sets for business, finance, product, brand and site managers.

Cheng added that the incorporation of both modules has followed ATG's two-tiered approach to integration issues. First, he explained, ATG builds its commerce and portal tools with open architectures to facilitate integration of other modules. Second, the company chooses one particular solution to each integration issue and provides it. Wrapping the search and analytics function into the module bundle is an example of this second technique.

Publishing for Dollars

ATG said the addition of the publishing module answers customer requests for ways to optimize online assets already in place, such as catalogs and service information. "A lot of our customers are going into their third phase of online CRM deployment," said Cheng. "Now that they've got operations worked out, they are aiming for optimization -- trying to increase revenues and push more of their higher-margin products."

To be able to do that, according to ATG, business managers must be able to alter online content in employee, partner and customer portals without programming intervention.

Mark Peacock, Deloitte Consulting partner, told CRM Buyer that this is one of the strengths of portals -- their ability to provide an enormous breadth of consistent information to wide audiences. "A lot of their value," he said, "is providing a gateway and pulling a lot of stuff onto one screen."

Web Services "Simply a Tool"

Cheng explained that ATG's architecture for both its commerce and portal platforms revolves around Tibco's technology for messaging. That interface can be swapped out for a Web-services-based one, although ATG is focusing its R&D efforts on Web services business functionality rather than developer technology, according to Cheng.

"Web services is simply a tool," he said. "If you don't apply a tool to a problem, it's not much use."