IBM to acquire ILOG and other rumors

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, March 21, 2006 @ 1:32 pm

One of the rumors making the rounds was that IBM would acquire ILOG and
integrate it into it's Websphere suite. Also, there were a number of
folks from Oracle at the conference looking for intelligence on the
various business rules products. The Oracle people were playing their
cards close to the vest, but it seemed that they were weighing a build
vs. buy decision.

It should be noted that both IBM and Oracle
have some form of rules based systems in their arsenal. IBM has had a
research project under way since 1997, called Business Rules for Electronic Commerce.
Oracle also has some stuff in the works. Look for an announcement at
OpenWorld in San Francisco, December 5-9. (They may pre-release this
mysterious business rules stuff on OTN
as part of OracleAS 10.1.3 developer preview 4 in January, 2005.) And
if you look at both Oracle's and IBM's vast product array, you'll find
quite a number of things that, with a little bit of squinting, could be
termed "rule engines." Still, neither of them has a nice system like
ILOG or Blaze Advisor with all the bells and whistles and tools that
makes developing a business rules solution feasible.

What does
an acquisition of an existing BRE vendor by either IBM or Oracle mean
for the rest of us? Given my experience with these large vendors, the
change will be both good and bad. First, they will bring a large
infusion of resources, both for development and support. The product
will acquire a number of new features and offer excellent integration
facilities with their other products. Second, they will bring a greater
level of professionalism to the consulting and professional services
ranks that work for or with the vendor.

On the down side, these
big players try to guide clients and consultants into homogeneous
solutions -- all Oracle or all IBM. Many folks will find themselves
choosing a rule engine because it's part of the Oracle or IBM solution
framework, not because it's more appropriate to the task at hand. It's
a seductive proposition from a management perspective -- only one
vendor to deal with, lower integration costs, etc. -- but often results
in more expensive, bloated and technologically inappropriate systems.
That's why you have these endless cycles of winding and unwinding, of
consolidation and decentralization in the corporate world, as the
vendors and technologies du jour fall in and out of favor.

Last,
if ILOG is bought by a big player, FairIsaac may also become a takeover
target. It's tough to be a pure play when the big animals enter the
cage.

Related posts:

1. ILog Aquired by IBM
2. Vendor Highlights
3. IBM and ILOG playing nice
4. Exaggerated Claims and the Importance of Hands-on Evaluation
5. GWT Showcase – BRMS for JBoss Rules

Comments (1)

business rules engines

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1. 

   Actually, I know that Oracle started working on their own rule engine back in 2001, but their recent release wraps other RETE engines. IBM has ABLE and CommonRules. Both projects are on IBM’s AlphaWorks. ABLE stands for Agent Building learning environment, which claims to implement RETE. CommonRules is a tuple based implementation and was started by Benjamin Grosoff before he left IBM and joined MIT.

   Aside from FairIssacs and iLog, there’s also Mindbox, which uses CBR approach. They also happen to own the old C++ RETE engine build by ART Technologies. ART inspired CLIPS, so in many ways most engines today are decendents of OPS5 rule engine.

   peter lin

   Comment by Peter Lin, Wednesday, March 29, 2006 @ 11:11 pm

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