Wang and Dawes’ “The Next Generation Integrated Library System: A Promise Fulfilled” is an interesting article, but I think it omits some other serious contenders in “next generation ILS” — both OCLC’s WMS and Serial Solutions Inota are being marketted, and (as far as we can tell) designed in quite similar ways as Ex Libris’s ALMA with regard to including electronic resources in integrated workflows.

Options are certainly good. It’s noteworthy that the community-driven Kuali OLE is the only one of these products that will be runnable on a library’s own servers (as opposed to being proprietary closed-source software running as a service on a commercial company’s servers), but it’s also unclear how big the market is for software you run yourself. There are undeniable advantages to software that runs as a service (both not having to run it yourself, and certain ‘network effects’ of design, which Alma, WMS, and Innota all mean to take advantage of) — it would certainly be nice if you could have these without locking yourself into a closed-source black-box proprietary solution… but that option does not seem to be on the table.