I’ve used the ILog Business Rules products on a number of projects. Reasonable software. Does the job. Not exactly cheap. I’m not sure why they went for the aquisition by IBM — it was announced back at the end of July, so likely nothing to do with hard economic times.

What does this mean for software developers and system integrators? Back when the aquisition plans were first announced, I joked that we would soon be using WebSphere rules. And wouldn’t you know it, the aquisition announcement mentions ILog and WebSphere in the same sentence several times.

So, what does it mean for us? It means that IBM is likely going to give the ILog business rules products the WebSphere treatment, i.e. polute a perfectly good package with all sorts of WebSphere goodness until it isn’t fit for integrator consumption. I’m sure there are going to be at least twice as many xml configurations files and an enourmous Java runtime that takes 10 minutes to start up.

Actually, IBM isn’t even the worst of the big software vendors in regard to infecting aquisitions. Oracle is the undisputed champ in this regard. Don’t get me wrong, I love their database product, but they buy a best-of-breed product, they get their hooks into it and turn it into something that you’d be crazy to run without the database. It makes sense from a product management perspective — if you want to sell more databases, make sure that people who buy your other products need to use your database. Ergo, rewrite 30% of the application in PL/SQL.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong about ILog and IBM.

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