IBM purchased iLog this morning. Now, I’ll admit that I don’t know iLog extreamly well. I actually heard about them for the first time last week at the Adobe Analyst Summit (which was a nice introduction to LiveCycle ES).
Dark Data in the Enterprise
On the other hand, I am nuts for the RIA. Even more so, I like seeing how RIAs get themselves into the enterprise world. I’m fond of pointing out that most RIAs need a back-end. There’s limitless “dark data” in the enterprise locked behind boring interfaces.
Think of how boring geo-data and local land tax estimates were before Google Maps and Zillow came along. Now we can’t get enough of tax estimates!
Enterprise Data RIA Frameworks
So far, I haven’t seen an extremely tight connection between enterprise back-ends and RIAs. Sure, there are several examples here and there – Adobe Geniuses is a recent stand-out, BMC has the dashboards, James loves the TMobile RAP, and folks like eVapt are examples of the architectural-viral nature of Flex (it starts in charts!) – but I haven’t found many general, middle-ware centric frameworks.
Thus far, SAP has stood out as the biggest enterprise user of Adobe’s RIA suite. Getting back to IBM and iLog, it’s fun parlor games to think on what IBM would do with the Adobe RIA connection wrapped up in iLog’s Elixer. I hear iLog, now IBM, and Adobe have a working relationship on the LiveCycle ES front, and it seems like there is – or could be – something going on in RIA-land as well. We’ll have to see if this page gets fleshed out more ;>
Disclosure: Adobe, IBM, BMC, and eVapt are clients.
This is certainly cool stuff. This will be the second big IBM purchase which relates to Flex. Cognos is using Flex and AIR in quite a few places.
Also you didn't mention Oracle's use of Flex:
http://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/category/oracl…
Oracle's new sales.com – Sales Prospector is a Flex application with more to come.
There are lots of exciting things happening in enterprise software!
-James
The press releases from ILOG and IBM focus on the business rules product: "Through this proposed transaction, IBM will combine its business process management (BPM), business optimization, and service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies with ILOG’s Business Rules Management Systems software."
It appears that IBM is making the acquisition primarily for the BRMS; hopefully this doesn't mean that the other products die on the vine.