More Business Rules Consolidation?

Do you remember the buzz at Business Rules Forum 2008 when RulesBurst / Haley did not show up?  We all suspected an acquisition and soon got confirmation of the suspicious absence of this “regular” at the show.  They had been acquired by Oracle.

This year again, one of the usual suspects did not come and, since then, the industry has been buzzing quite a bit.  Well, technically the company was there, but the leadership team was not.  We have reasons to believe that our colleagues have been acquired by another platform vendor.  Do not look for the big names though.  It is quite interesting to see the growing presence of BPM / CEP vendors in the Decision Management space, fast acquiring business rules capabilities…

let’s wait and see how long it will take for the rumor to turn into a formal announcement!

On the BRMS side though, we are left with fewer and fewer independent vendors.  This puts more pressure on the vendor locking issue.  The standards are not nearly mature enough to allow for interplay between the rules vendors — which has not been a burning issue up to now.  But as BRMS are becoming an integral part of the entire platform, the initiative of swapping them becomes less of a per-project decision…  and as a result, the current investment in business rules assets might require a port from platform A to platform B, meaning from BRMS A to BRMS B, as companies standardize on those ecosystems…

What are the outlets?  Investing on interoperability standards is the long road.  My personal inclination would be to take a better look at decision modeling environments — but I am biased of course 😉