Spend big and spend with style if you want to make money

An advertisement in an upmarket US magazine shows a contemplative man wearing an attractive pair of silk trousers with the caption: "The last thing the world needs is another guy in a pair of khakis." About the only reason for the existence of such an advertisement is the technology industry.

A slice of the audience that advertisement targets is gathered in a swanky resort in Palm Springs, California for a software company's users' conference. There are 600 of them - programmers, website designers, systems guys, directors - and their most noticeable feature (besides the fact they are almost all men) is that they are nearly all in khakis.

Khakis are the uniform of Silicon Valley and the youthful technology industry culture it has spawned across the US, inevitably filtering into mainstream corporate culture.

It's a culture of casualness, but moneyed casualness. Europeans don't get it. They have arrived in shirts and trousers, and the Germans are wearing ties.

It's a culture that dislikes ostentation, but likes having a good time. It likes to know that money has been spent in order to ensure a good time. So all the men in khakis are being treated according to these unspoken, but understood industry tenets, by the software company that has brought them here, ATG.

ATG is based in La Quinta, one of the premier resorts in the desert paradise of Palm Springs. On arrival they received ATGlogoed sunscreen, a golf shirt embroidered with computer company names and an enormous insulated sports bag (perfect for keeping your bottles of Corona cool under the ruthless desert sun).

They have been offered golf - at once casual and expensive - the perfect sport of the techies and spa treatments. Receptions and parties every night feature tables laden with upmarket gastronomic treats, live music, and one night, games of golf-cart polo in Palm Springs' polo stadium.

ATG - the new, sleek name for what was Art Technology Group - has been around since 1991, which makes it almost middle-aged in computer-industry terms. But it does cool stuff, Web stuff, software that, in industry jargon, "manages customer relationships online" for fashionable companies like Letsbuyit.com, Benetton and Italia Online.

Then chief executive Mr Jeet Singh and chief technology officer Mr Joe Chung, both former Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab students, decided in 1995 to market the Website software they'd developed in-house. It was a hard transition. "At a couple of points along the way, the company was basically insolvent. We came pretty close to the critical `doesnot-exist' problem," says Mr Chung.

Now a millionaire, he sits cross-legged on a fat armchair in a La Quinta suite. In his late 30s, Mr Chung looks 19 and, incongruously, speaks with the authority of a seasoned company director.

As he talks he regularly scoops handfuls of crisps from a large bowl. He says that for a while, ATG couldn't pay its employees. Then things improved as websites increasingly needed the kind of Web management product the company provides.

ATG went public last July, raising $50 million (€52 million). Now the company is hot, one of a tiny handful in a crucial sector. Mr Singh recently bought his own jet.

"The Web is taking centre stage, and that's one of the reasons things have been growing so quickly at ATG," says Mr Singh. He's on stage, giving an energetic keynote to kick off the three-day event, despite the fact that there was a party in his hotel suite until 4 a.m. the night before.

He is not wearing khakis, but grey trousers. He sports a ponytail, which jiggles as he draws diagrams manically on a flip-chart.

He is charismatic, and the audience pays close attention to his jargon-spattered presentation. He speaks fluently of "our ecosystem of partners", "vertical silos" and "customer life cycles".

He tells them what his product, Dynamo, does now and what it will be able to do soon. He is candid: he expects competitors to offer the same features but feels they have two advantages - they were in the market first and they use the flexible Java programming language, which the market likes.

An indication of how quickly ATG's market has grown is that last year 140 people came to its user conference in Boston, where the company is based; this year, it has 600 at a posh resort. Last year, it targeted Europe by opening a London office with three people, now there are 60. Other European offices have opened and the company says it expects European business to grow 10 times over this year.

Soon, it is entering the Irish market through system integration partners Vision and Digital Channel Partners. It's also involved in a big e-commerce project with AIB Bank, but declines to give details.

To be seen as successful in the crowded US technology market these days means upping your profile, spending and doing it with style. It means backpacks, golf-cart polo and margaritas served in pint-sized margarita glasses. So far, ATG is doing it well.

klillington@irish-times.ie.