IBM has completed its approximately $340 million tender offer for the shares of ILOG, which offers Business Rule Management System (BRMS), Optimization, Visualization, and Supply Chain Management (SCM) portfolios. The tender offer was initially announced July of 2008. "I think it is going to be one of our strongest strategic acquisitions that we have made at IBM," Sandy Carter, IBM vice president for SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Headquartered in Paris, France, ILOG has more than 2,500 customers, 850 employees and operations in 30 countries around the world. ILOG will become part of the IBM WebSphere software portfolio.
The acquisition will allow IBM to enter several new markets, observes Carter. One of them is a standalone rules business. "Today, we have some rules capability within our WebSphere Suite but this product is much more robust and allows us to sell rules all by itself, which is a growing marketplace," she notes. The ILOG BRMS products help businesses improve their decision making by letting them adapt and respond dynamically.
The acquisition also adds in other new pieces to IBM's business, including optimization. Based on applied mathematics and computer science, the ILOG optimization products allow enterprises to transform business objectives, resources and operational constraints into best possible action plans and schedules to enhance service, revenue and profits, according to IBM. In fact, Carter says, IBM uses that optimization technology in its own supply chain.
A third new piece ILOG adds is in the area of supply chain management solutions, which include Network Design, Inventory Optimization, Production Planning, and Scheduling. And the fourth key piece that the ILOG acquisition adds is visualization, which allows users to take information and transform it into a visual picture so action can be taken, explains Carter. Germany's national railway company uses ILOG technology to visualize the trains as they dispatch. As a result of the deployment, Carter states, the transportation company has achieved improvement in on-time performance, reductions in staff training time, and more accurate decision-making.
According to IBM, the ILOG acquisition will strengthen IBM's business process management (BPM) and SOA position by providing customers a broad set of rule management tools for information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform, including IBM's leading WebSphere application development and management platform. Many of the ILOG products will also become part of IBM's Industry Frameworks, which are integrated solutions that support industry specific business and technology standards.
For more information, go here. To watch a demo on YouTube showing how WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition and ILOG JRules, visualizations and optimization technology combine to offer an end-to-end business process management solution, allowing a business leader to make decisions more quickly, go here.