Software and systems vendor Oracle has announced its intention to acquire ecommerce software vendor Art Technology Group (ATG) for $1 billion.

ATG counts some of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers among its clients, including US electronics giant BestBuy and PC maker Dell.

Earlier this year, analyst company Gartner ranked ATG as the leader of the ecommerce software market, alongside IBM. Oracle’s existing ecommerce product, named iStore, was ranked behind SAP and Microsoft in the same report.

Gartner said that ATG is recognised “as a vendor that can deliver a complete, multichannel ecommerce solution” and that it has consistently introduced innovative additions such as social media integration to its products, although it added that some customers “have expressed that ATG’s pricing is too high”.

Oracle’s iStore, meanwhile, has “an industrial look and feel”, an install base that “mostly consists of [business-to-business] implementations in the high-technology, communications and industrial manufacturing industries”, and does not support social software features, Gartner said.

The acquired company announced its latest financial figures alongside the acquisition news. Revenues for its most recent financial quarter were $50.3 million, up 16% from the same period of last year.

This expansion was driven by the continued growth of ecommerce. In the US, online retail grew 11% to $155.2 billion in the US in 2009 and will grow to $248.7 billion by 2014, according to recent figures from Forrester Research. In Western Europe, online retail revenue will grow from €68 billion in 2009 to €114 billion in 2014, the analyst company predicted.