At the end, the acquisition of ILOG by IBM is a bit stabilized and Even though the new parent company is known more for supplying IT infrastructure products, ILOG says it will not abandon users of its packaged supply chain management solutions.

According to Manufacturing Business Technology, the $340-million deal was completed January 6, 2009, exactly six weeks before the start of the ILOG's annual user conference, which took place in Orlando February 3-5.

"We pursued ILOG for all four of its product lines," says Tom Rosamilia, GM of the Application & Integration Middleware Division within the IBM Software Group. "We have no intentions of sun-setting anything."

David Simchi-Levi, ILOG's chief scientist who is also a professor at MIT, says existing ILOG supply chain customers can expect the merger to bring added capabilities-starting with enhancements to ILOG's sales & operations planning solutions-as well as a higher level of customer service.

"ILOG had a relatively small number of consultants," Simchi-Levi says "Now, together with IBM, we can support customers with thousands of consultants focusing on different levels of supply chain challenges, in areas where we did not necessarily have expertise before but customers would like us to help them with."