Do you remember the buzz at Business Rules Forum 2008 when RulesBurst / Haley did not show up? We all suspected an acquisition and soon got confirmation of the suspicious absence of this “regular” at the show. They had been acquired by Oracle.
This year again, one of the usual suspects did not come and, since then, the industry has been buzzing quite a bit. Well, technically the company was there, but the leadership team was not. We have reasons to believe that our colleagues have been acquired by another platform vendor. Do not look for the big names though. It is quite interesting to see the growing presence of BPM / CEP vendors in the Decision Management space, fast acquiring business rules capabilities…
let’s wait and see how long it will take for the rumor to turn into a formal announcement!
On the BRMS side though, we are left with fewer and fewer independent vendors. This puts more pressure on the vendor locking issue. The standards are not nearly mature enough to allow for interplay between the rules vendors — which has not been a burning issue up to now. But as BRMS are becoming an integral part of the entire platform, the initiative of swapping them becomes less of a per-project decision… and as a result, the current investment in business rules assets might require a port from platform A to platform B, meaning from BRMS A to BRMS B, as companies standardize on those ecosystems…
What are the outlets? Investing on interoperability standards is the long road. My personal inclination would be to take a better look at decision modeling environments — but I am biased of course ;-)
Carlos Serrano-Morales
Carole-Ann
Colleen McClintock
Marc Lerman
Just to mention that IBM took over the BRMS vendor ILog last year.
By: Martin Bartonitz on November 8, 2011
at 11:40 pm
Time flies… that acquisition was announced in 2008 and was completed early 2009 (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26403.wss).
And that came after a number of acquisitions from platform vendors (SAP, Oracle, …).
By: Carlos Serrano-Morales on November 9, 2011
at 6:54 am
[...] http://techondec.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/more-business-rules-consolidation/ [...]
By: BPM Product Acquisitions & Milestones « Nischala’s Space, Thoughts, Expressions… on November 16, 2011
at 2:45 am
CAB-M:
And then there were two; IBM/ILOG JRules and FICO Blaze Advisor. Rule Burst bought Haley. Oracle bought Rule Burst and doesn’t know what to do with it. At least IBM had the sense to let ILOG run with some money for R&D. Remember Daniel Selman’s (ILOG) comment about, “Watch this space!” concerning performance at Rules Fest. To me, that meant that ILOG is going to pour some resources into improving performance this coming year.
I look for drools to improve until they either become a full-blown BRMS or they die from lack of funds for R&D. Jess, CLIPS, OPSJ and others will always have niche and continue to advance.
Later…
SDG
jco
By: James on November 28, 2011
at 6:47 pm
I think the jury is still out as to who will be the remaining vendors in this space.
There is a lot of consolidation of course. In particular Platform vendors are acquiring BRMS.
But some vendors are not focused any longer — see the July 2011 Forrester report mentioning that Pega pivoted to CRM / BPM and FICO focusing on existing customers.
In the same report, Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer identified Jacob’s OpenRules and Sparkling Logic as being the only innovators — in a market in need of innovation.
There is still a (little) bunch of vendors that are independent: Corticon (for now), InRule, Innovation (as it seems that they have kept they autonomy in the Bosch acquisition), etc.
The marketing machine of IBM is a very good thing for the space as it creates awareness where they was little.
By: Carole-Ann on November 29, 2011
at 6:07 am
[...] you guess right on the acquisition rumors that were spreading at BBC 2011 this [...]
By: Decision Management Rumors Confirmed « Everything Decision Management, Technically Speaking on December 5, 2011
at 9:43 am