History:
In 2005, I tried to get the platform players to embrace agile infrastructure and business process concepts to no avail. IBM laughed me off the stage at an IBM fellows meeting. when I mentioned rules technologies. Oracle did not see the importance, but understood the idea. Microsoft said they had rule technology, but it was barely usable by programmers and SAP said “huh?” I turned to the emerging BPMS market and they embraced the idea of business rule driven agility controlled by business types and ran with it.
So what are these power vendors up to? Did they see the light and decide to enable agile infrastructure platforms? I think not. Each vendor had a different driver and follows different paths. I’m not sure they will ever converge until one of the platform vendors starts to pull away leveraging business rule technology..
IBM:
IBM recently bought ILOG, a leader in the business rule arena. The reason is that ILOG has proven that it has a viable business and IBM Global Solutions was leveraging many deals using ILOG. While I wish IBM would leverage the ILOG rule engine in their WebSphere offering along with some strong optimization capabilities, I do not think IBM is up to the task. IBM already has a mediocre rule engine aimed at programmers that will cause issues going forward.
Microsoft:
While MSFT has a couple of programmer focused rule engines embedded in BizTalk and Visual Studio, they do have some interesting vocabulary and semantic based technologies that they picked up when Unisys let some developers go. While this is great stuff, it does not have the visibility necessary to be leveraged. My hope would be to embed this friendly capability in the MSFT infrastructure, but this is a low probability.
Oracle
The best way to describe the Oracle approach to business rule technology is unfocused. They just bought Haley, a vocabulary focused approach that is being used to enable some governance applications and CRM applications. They bought Logical Apps for specific applications only. While Oracle uses a variant of the JESS rule engine, none of the major applications Oracle have leverage it yet despite promises to do so.
SAP
SAP bought YASU and is carefully embedding it into Net Weaver, but it looks only to be used in surround components around the core business application transactions.
I really wish one or several of these power vendors would catch the drift of really leveraging scenarios, policies and business rules in their offerings, to support agile infrastructure, processes and decisions, but I’m not going to hold my breath for fear of death. I believe other vendors, who are not committed to customer control will get the job done.
7 responses so far ↓
1 The small impact of business rules on the big players » Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog // Nov 21, 2008 at 8:09 am
[...] Sinur brought up an interesting point today when he blogged IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have bought Business Rule Technology. What’s up with that? The big players seem to be toying with business rules - there’s plenty of activity but not [...]
2 James Taylor // Nov 21, 2008 at 8:10 am
Nice post Jim - added my thoughts here:
http://smartenoughsystems.com/wp/2008/11/21/the-small-impact-of-business-rules-on-the-big-players/
It will be interesting to see what happens and which of the vendors figure out how to use business rules to make their applications and platforms more decision-centric.
JT
3 Jim Sinur // Nov 21, 2008 at 10:14 am
I would like to see one of the power vendor take the lead. I think it would jump start the momentum for the platform players. It might be up to the independents, however.
4 Neil Raden // Nov 21, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Jim,
I see some of this coming from a different angle - BI, not operaational systems and architecture and rules engine vendors.
Consider Oracle, which offers RTD (Real-Time Decisions) as part of its OBI EE suite (formerly Siebel Analytics). Siebel introduced RTD in ‘05 before being acquired by Oracle, to provide r-t, self-learning predictive modeling to plug into Siebel CRM. They used the technology from Sigma Dynamics and after Oracle acquired Siebel, Oracle purchased the assets of the Sigma Dynamics.
So sort of skipping the BRMS piece, Siebel jumped right into decision services. They were on the right track.
I’m hearing more and more of my BI contacts (clients, not vendors) getting interested in this, even if they don’t know what to call it. I think that, while we wait for the big stack vendors to sort out what they’re doing with rules, the other side of the house may get a leg up on decision services as a natural extension to BI (which was, after all, once called decision support).
-NR
twitter: nraden
5 Jim Sinur // Nov 21, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I agree that operational and/or managerial processes are not the only entry to leveraging rules better. With the premium on measurement drvien by challenging times, this makes sense. I hope they meet in he middle. It’s kind of like starting two tunnels on either side of the mountain. This should be designed to meet in the middle
6 Oracle and Business Rules: Purposed Split Strategies // Mar 5, 2009 at 11:01 am
[...] in November, I gave some history of the power vendors attitude towards business rules(see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/11/18/ibm-microsoft-oracle-and-sap-have-bought-business-rule...) After some more detailed interaction Oracle on the topic, I have some new insights for you. Oracle [...]
7 » Surveying the Platform Player Rules Acquisitions Karl Reinsch’s Blog // May 7, 2009 at 12:11 am
[...] Sinur of Gartner has a fairly recent post where he surveys the platform players and their recent acquisitions of rules technologies. Jim looks at each player and gives his [...]
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