IBM to buy ILOG.

July 28, 2008

So, IBM makes an obvious & much needed play in the Rules Engine market to acquire ILOG for a cool $340M. Assuming a “satisfactory fairness opinion” is attained, this is going to be a go around mid-September.

Pretty smart play by IBM and it shows a strong long-term commitment to their ECM/BPM strategy over the next few years. They did some honest introspection and realized that the inherent business rules capability within Websphere Process Server was basic & tightly integrated.

On a tactical level, this is a great play to complement their FileNet acquisition and further differentiate themselves from the EMC Documentum stack. It will be interesting to see how EMC counters this because ILOG is their “go to” provider for rules engine integration to complement the Proactivity BPM/BAM tools for modeling & analysis.

When Documentum 6 was launched, Bounty Ing, deputy CEO and executive vice president for Asia-Pacific at ILOG said:

“As a long-time EMC Documentum partner, iLog is extremely excited about the new Documentum 6 platform, we plan to leverage the new Web services API to easily integrate our iLog BRMS with the Documentum 6 platform, which will allow our mutual customers to enhance their existing IT investments with additional flexibility, transparency and speed for faster time to market, while also meeting the SOA promise of reuse and agility.”

Once the blue-wash is complete, will this relationship still stand? I am pretty sure EMC customers will be asking the same question.

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