Christmas in July? IBM acquires ILOG!

While I’m sure that TBSM’s use of ILOG wasn’t in the business case for IBM’s announced purchase of ILOG today, I am getting my hopes up that this is the Christmas present that anyone using TBSM is looking for.

TBSM makes extensive use of ILOG under the covers for the core of the canvas and visualization. We barely scratch the surface in capabilities (see demos below) in how its used, but it is the foundation for all of the data driven widgets used in the canvas, custom dashboards, etc.

Let’s face it, we have a long way to improve in our dashboarding and visualization capabilities. The acquisition and product convergence focus has been a significant impact on new innovation in this area within TBSM. With the upcoming release of TBSM v4.2 soon to be behind us, I hope that we can finally make investments where they are desperately needed within the data visualization, user experience, widgets, real time charting/graphing and general sex appeal areas for creating the dashboards expected of products in this price point.

TBSM 4.2 will give us a new platform to build upon, but it WILL NOT MAKE SENSE to develop other components (widgets, charts/graphs, analytics, rules, visaulziation, workflow, etc.) in the buzz word of the day (AJAX, Dojo, Python, RoR, PHP, TCR/BIRT) when we may have this ILOG portfolio at our disposal. (my opinion only, I ack the biz side of these decisions)

I strongly encourage you to voice your thoughts and requirements for improvement of TBSM’s capabilities in these areas via appropriate channels.

ILOG has a log of powerful capabilities to offer should we choose to take advantage of them. Better yet, equipping you to take advantage of them with self service designers, SDKs, APIs, etc.

For example:

ILOG Visualization Portfolio
ILOG Diagrammer (TBSM uses this)
ILOG JViews Demos
ILOG Elixer
ILOG Elixer Demos AWESOME! Look at Gauges & Dials Demo!

I hope this is the Christmas present we’ve all been waiting on for TBSM this time next year!