As IBM absorbs ILOG it will be important that it continue to invest is this multi-platform approach. Not only are there some nice features in the .Net product (that I for one would like to see available to the Java product) but decision management with business rules is, for most companies, a multi-platform problem. The value of using business rules to decision management comes in part from making sure the same rules are used everywhere they are supposed to be used. While deploying business rules in Decision Services on SOA makes this easier, the best solution is to allow the rules to be packaged up and deployed as Java components, Web Services, .Net assemblies or COBOL code so that they can run natively on all the platforms that run the business.