Art Technology Group

» see atg.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The "Art" was supposed to mean music. Jeet Singh and Joseph Chung had talked about building a company around electronic instruments, Chung having run the hyperinstrument group's technical side at the MIT Media Lab, and they incorporated on 31 December 1991 with about five thousand dollars between them, which Singh said was just enough to pay the lawyers. The music part never happened. What happened instead was interactive-media contract work through Media Lab connections: a museum exhibit in New Jersey, a QuickTime promotion for Apple in Japan.

By 1995 the clients were MCI and Harvard Business School, and the company had noticed it was building the same thing over again for each of them. So it wrote a web application server called Dynamo, and sold that instead. Dynamo Personalization Server, then Dynamo Commerce Server. Behind the names sat one idea that turned out to matter: a site should be able to look different to different visitors, and a retailer should be able to define the rules for that without filing a ticket with engineering.

The IPO was on 21 July 1999, five million shares at twelve dollars, ticker ARTG on NASDAQ. Revenue multiplied by five in a single year, $32.1 million in 1999 against $163.3 million in 2000, an increase of 409 percent, and the company was actually profitable at the top, $14.5 million of net income. Headcount was 943 at the end of 2000 and still climbing.

I was sixteen when that share price peaked. Turkey in 2000 meant a dial-up line topping out at 33.6k, and the Nasdaq was something that turned up on the evening news between the exchange rate and the weather. The part of ATG that eventually reached me was invisible and years later: the checkout page at a large retailer, which is where the company's software spent most of its working life.

~ the case file ~

~ the two peaks ~

ARTG's quarterly high in the third quarter of 2000 was $126.88. Its quarterly low in the second quarter of 2002 was 78 cents. Both numbers come out of the company's own 10-K filings, out of the dull table of quarterly highs and lows that every annual report carries, two filings and two years apart.

What followed was ugly and survivable. The 2001 restructuring charge was $76.9 million, most of it for office space the company could no longer fill, and 530 people went, 46 percent of the workforce. The net loss that year was $156 million on revenue of $138.9 million. A further charge came in late 2002 and another 125 people went in January 2003.

And then the second peak, which is the part most accounts leave out. Revenue in 2009 was $179.4 million, higher than the bubble year, with $16.8 million of net income and roughly 1,200 clients on the books. The share price never came close to recovering and did not need to. Online retail had become ordinary and ATG was selling the plumbing for it.

~ two lists ~

The customer list is the interesting artifact. In 1999 it reads like a museum of the period: AltaVista, GoTo.com, TheStreet.com, Network Solutions, living.com, Peapod. By 2010 the same list is a shopping mall: Best Buy, JC Penney, CVS, Williams-Sonoma, Lego, Tesco, Vodafone, AT&T. Four of the six names in the first list are gone, and the second list is mostly still trading.

Oracle's own acquisition deck claimed ATG was deployed at 43 of the Internet Retailer Top 500, more than any competing platform shown. That is the buyer's marketing and should be read as such, but nobody has put forward a smaller number.

~ the word in the file paths ~

Oracle announced the purchase on 2 November 2010 at six dollars a share, a 46 percent premium on a $4.10 close, about a billion dollars in total. The merger completed on 5 January 2011, when a shell called Amsterdam Acquisition Sub Corporation merged into ATG and every share converted to six dollars in cash. NASDAQ suspended trading and filed the delisting form the same afternoon. The registration was formally terminated on 18 January.

The product name lasted three more years as Oracle ATG Web Commerce, until release 11.0 rebranded the suite to Oracle Commerce. Oracle's own release note is unusually honest about how far the rename went: the new branding appears in the user interfaces and in the files you download, while most code elements, including default installation paths and APIs, still use the term ATG. The name is still sitting in the import statements of every store running that stack.

atg.com still resolves, and sends you to a page on oracle.com filed under corporate acquisitions, which is where companies go when they have been bought and the buyer wants search traffic to land somewhere polite.

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