ATG cuts applications free from application server

By Tom Sullivan
InfoWorld, 07/10/01

ART Technology Group (ATG) on Tuesday said that it is cutting the hooks that tie its application suite to its application server.

Citing a commoditization of application servers, customer demand and the fact a lot of large companies have multiple application servers from a variety of vendors, CEO Jeet Singh said the company is looking to generate revenue by distributing its applications to a broader audience.

"From a dollar point of view, we don't make most of our money on the application server. The application server has been a requirement to run the applications," he said.

Cambridge, Mass.-based ATG's applications - including a commerce server, scenario server and personalization server - will be able to run on application servers from BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard and iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions. The company plans to add IBM's WebSphere to that list in the near future.

Singh added that the advancements of competitor's application servers opened new opportunities for ATG.

"It hasn't been until recently that the application servers are coming up to par where they can run really sophisticated applications like ours," he said. "The one disadvantage we had is that we were still running only on our own application server because we needed a lot of stuff within it, and that now is changing."

Singh continued that the application servers are becoming commodities, and ATG needs to differentiate itself.

Analysts have said that application servers have been becoming commodities for months now.

According to Shawn Willet, a principal analyst at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis, application server vendors are looking to differentiate themselves with the pieces on top of the application server stack.

Indeed, earlier this year Iona Technologies worked to round out its application server stack into an e-business platform. BEA Systems and iPlanet have done the same, while IBM and Oracle tied their application servers more closely to their databases.

A recent report by Framingham, Mass.-based consultancy IDC listed BEA with 18.2% market share, IBM with 15.4% and Sun/iPlanet with 8%.

ATG cuts applications free from application server

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