Today, we announced ATG’s acquisition of CleverSet, a leader in automated personalization and recommendations technology. With this acquisition, ATG can now offer online sellers the “best of both worlds” in personalization, delivering an optimized e-commerce investment for our customers and an optimized buying experience for their customers.

The announcement and the CleverSet site have plenty of detail about why we think CleverSet has the best technology of its kind on the market. But for years we have touted ATG’s rules-based approach as the optimal way to personalize the online shopping experience, so you might (quite logically) ask if this acquisition of an automated personalization vendor signifies a shift in ATG’s philosophy. The short answer is “not at all!” But I suspect you might like a little more detail, so here’s the story…

The two approaches to personalization are actually highly complementary. The rules-based personalization on the ATG platform can be ubiquitous across the site, and its flexibility allows companies to apply personalization strategies in many different ways. ATG’s personalization is most effectively used in situations where the merchant has a defined and well-understood market segmentation, and understands what the likely best cross-sell offer would be for particular purchase histories and behaviors. ATG allows the merchant to take total responsibility for and total control over creating, managing, and adjusting those business rules.

CleverSet personalization is different from ATG’s in that it is automatic. It “learns” based on the statistical relationships of data. Today, CleverSet focuses on automating product recommendations, and is extraordinarily useful to merchants who don’t necessarily have strong knowledge about what the best cross-sell offer might be for a particular customer. CleverSet is also valuable to merchants who simply don’t have the time, resources, or inclination to build and manage their own rules.

We expect that our customers will continue to use ATG personalization when they want to have close control of their personalization rules and integrate personalized search (show this group of sweaters to fashionistas and another group to others). They will likely use CleverSet more broadly to fully automate the personalization of offers and content when rules aren’t defined explicitly. And these are not mutually exclusive – we actually expect companies to use both implementations together. For example, a merchant could write a rule to do targeted cross sells to a particular segment and also use the CleverSet recommendations on the same page to help drive some other recommendations.

Similar to our eStara brand of products, CleverSet is platform-agnostic and will be offered on demand, delivered in a Software as a Service model. This makes CleverSet an easy add-on to any e-commerce Web site, whether or not it is built on the ATG platform.

We are absolutely thrilled about this acquisition – not only because we are getting great technology, but also great people who fit well with our organizational culture. I look forward to sharing more details when the deal closes.