Before I could even finish setting this blog up I spotted the news that Oracle has purchased Haley. (Tip of the virtual hat to Peter and Carole-Ann).
This sort of rule industry consolidation has long been predicted by a number of us.
For those keeping score, here are the acquisitions by the platform players:
- 17 October 2007: SAP + YASU
- 28 July 2008: IBM + Ilog
- 29 October 2008: Oracle + Haley
The question of what Oracle would do was certainly on people’s minds at the ORF last week, along with speculation about other potential consolidation.
It is certainly an interesting time to watch the rules space.
The key now is to see what the platform players will actually do with these acquisitions and the impact on the industry per-se. One group – I am part of it – will say that BRMS are going to, on one hand, become commodities within platforms and see their evolution in terms of platform integration (deep like what MS is thinking about ;)?), and, on the other hand, become the core of a wider Decision Management space.
My alter-ego in these matters, Carole-Ann, has some of her thoughts on her blog.
I am curious to know what your thoughts are on that. This is actually more technical than meets the eye, and the algorithmic and architectural challenges are considerable.
Carlos
Oracle Siebel products already use Haley:
http://www.oracle.com/applications/crm/siebel/crm-technology/business-rules.html
As for the middleware stack, Oracle Business Rules (OBR) is already included in the current 10.1.3.x release and greatly improved for the upcoming 11g release.
Disclaimer: I am an Oracle employee on the OBR team.
Hi Phil. Thanks for dropping in.
I am aware of Oracle’s usage of Haley (as well as Oracle’s usage of Jess). However, the acquisition is a new wrinkle.
(Your employer also owns Brightware via a series of nested acquisitions.)