IBM today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to buy business technology and services provider ILOG for $340 million, in a deal that would bring ILOG’s software to IBM’s business process management (BPM), business optimization, and services-oriented architecture technologies for information and application lifecycle management.
The companies maintained a partnership for more than a decade prior to today’s announcement, said Sandy Carter, vice president in charge of IBM’s WebSphere application development and management platform. Over the course of the partnership, IBM identified “tremendous value in ILOG, both as a partner and an acquisition candidate,” Carter said in an interview with Managing Automation.
The ILOG acquisition touches on three specific technology areas, she said: rules management, optimization, and visualization. The first involves the addition of ILOG’s business rule management capabilities to IBM’s software offerings. Specifically, ILOG adds end-to-end rule structure and governance to IBM’s BPM suite for complex rule change management. In a transportation scenario, for instance, in addition to identifying the driver with the most seniority, the ILOG technology adds the capability to determine whether that driver is available and whether he’s had a break within the past two hours, Carter said. “ILOG takes IBM’s BPM platform to the next level.”
ILOG also adds optimization software to IBM’s BPM suite, which is used to identify the best use of a company’s resources to achieve a given business goal, factoring in constraints, preferences, and other variables. A power company using the technology, for example, can apply it to managing power costs and reducing its carbon emissions. Optimization represents “an exciting new area for IBM,” Carter said; Big Blue has partnered with ILOG for these capabilities in its Global Business Services (GBS) business as well as its software products.