As an addition to Mark’s comments;
Each FTP server has logging mechanism. Probably you can liase with your company’s partner to turn on logging and see if there’s any meaningfull error on their side. At least you can see if your FTP client service hits their server.
Most likely you will get more meaningful error messages.
The error message shows that you may have authentication problem.
Kurt
#webMethods#Integration-Server-and-ESB#webmethods-Protocol-and-Transport