The small impact of business rules on the big players

Jim Sinur brought up an interesting point today when he blogged IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have bought Business Rule Technology. What’s up with that? The big players seem to be toying with business rules – there’s plenty of activity but not much understanding or commitment.

SAP bought Yasu but until recently did not show much sign of “getting” the potential (though Sandy’s post on a recent SAP presentation sounds more hopeful)
IBM is going to buy ILOG but we don’t have many details and the issue of how the WebSphere and Information Management/FileNet groups will integrate rules into their stories remains an open issue – there are folks at IBM who get it but concerns among watchers that the two groups will not make it work between them and only one piece (probably WebSphere) will end up with rules.
Oracle bought Haley/Ruleburst but has made it clear that its platform products for BPM/SOA will continue to use their JESS-based rules implementation and Decision Service API. This raises an interesting question about Oracle’s future plans – another acquisition (Blaze Advisor, say) or development of their own (as Savvion did recently) as part of the Fusion plans .
Microsoft meanwhile remains completely opaque with little bits of this and that as well as at least one company (InRule) with a perfect product should Microsoft decide to buy something.

So, will any of them “get it”? If so which one(s)? Guess we will have to wait and see but we live in interesting times…