ATG are well known has having the best eCommerce platform and vision for high end eCommerce sites. The majority of the top 300 retailers use it!
You must of heard of the SAP motto… “The best run businesses run SAP”.
So why ATG in a SAP Netweaver environment? Simple, combined together they are a formidable presence.
SAP has an extension to its CRM platform called the Internet Sales Application. But really this solution is not in the same league as ATG’s completely integrated offering. You don’t have to take my word for it… just look at what Gartner, Forrester and there own customers say. You can’t get a better reference. SAP is strong in Europe and expanding in the US.
ATG’s eCommerce offering to-date has only run on IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic, JBoss and its own app server the DAS. DAS will become end-of-life. ATG have plenty of customers running SAP Back office systems, however with the ambition 3 years ago for SAP to move its busines solutions from R/3 to the Java based Netweaver stack has brought opportunities for Cost Leadership, or more to the point, lowering TCO by running ATG on Netweaver’s Web Application Server (WAS). This would also bring simpler and cost effective integration using standard Netweaver components such as Exchange Infrastructure (XI). SAP brought a fully compilant version of JEE running on Java 5 to market before BEA and IBM! The SAP Java team are bringing some really good ideas to the JVM from 30 years experience working in Mainframes and R/3 world. For example, In Unix we had watchdog’s that managed and monitored processes. This provided the ability to re-start processes. In a standard JVM there is no such concept. We either have to bring down the whole JVM or make pieces of middleware to do the job. SAP have actually demostrated there application of acheiving this at past SDN Jam sessions. Cool stuff.
It’s a shame that ATG are just too focussed on the American market where SAP has still to get a major foot hold. As far as I am aware there are no plans to port the ATG stack to SAP Netweaver.
So to give them a pro-active push, I am looking for people to help me port the ATG stack to the Netweaver environment. Interested?
