The traditional “critical mass” core of business rule technology has been the “business rule engine”(BRE) market. This market is dissipating and being pushed or pulled into “use sectors” where business rules are important. There is an evolution going here that is both scary and exciting. We have seen each of the power vendors jump for a business rule engine and their behavior will make a difference on the health of the business rule engine market. If they back their purchases with market push, the BRE will continue to exist in some form, but this doesn’t really matter much because the emphasis is going to switch to the business rule management.
As the BRE spin into other arenas and new ones spring up, BREs will be commodities and spread like wildfire carried by the winds of change. BREs are a great way to deal with the need for response to change enabling agility, so the need won’t die. The need will shift to managing business rules across multiple BREs. When management decides to change a policy or enact a reaction to an emerging scenario, they will need to coordinate this change across multiple BREs, emerging new services and traditional applications (bespoke or purchased). This will put a premium on business rule management systems (BRMS). As the decision management market continues to evolve, it will be a major driver behind business rules as well as the traditional agility play going forward.
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Bottom Line:
While the BRE is waning, the BRMS market is forming. All eyes will be on the power vendors, who want to drive their engine as ad hoc standards and the multiple standards committees who need to coalesce to beat the power vendors. The race is on and long live business rules !
4 responses so far ↓
1 James Taylor // Jan 8, 2009 at 11:45 pm
A BRMS market or a Decision Management System / Platform market? It seems to me that business rules are simply spread too thin – there is too much you could associate with business rules. To gain traction you must focus on managing decisions – intelligently and across the enterprise.
JT
Author of Smart (Enough) Systems
2 Jim Sinur // Jan 9, 2009 at 9:33 am
The BRMS will actively support the Intelligent Decidion Management and the BPM markets activel , but decisioning is the big fish in hte long run.
3 Paul Vincent // Jan 9, 2009 at 10:19 am
Jim – I’m not sure there has been much of a “BRE” market outside of the BPM OEM market for a while. The traditional BRE vendors have been mostly investing in BRMS development since the beginning of the century
and indeed could be viewed as mostly CASE tools today (i.e. CASE-for-decision-services).
See also for http://tibcoblogs.com/cep/2008/08/14/the-end-is-nigh-for-the-bre-market/ which pretty much aligns with your comments.
On the other hand, with consolidation of BRMS vendors into BPMS vendors (IBM/Ilog, SAP/Yasu), one could argue that the days of the standalone BRMS market are limited, not starting – hence James’ comment as BRMS vendors expand into analytics (EDM), event-based rules (CEP), etc.
Cheers
Cheers
4 Bernard Debauche // Jan 12, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I would like to emphasize Jim’s vision that governance 1. is required, and 2. must be global. When building an agile system, one has to think about managing/governing process and service models, rules and policies, and data flows and translation maps all together. Managing these things in isolation induces more cost. Governance is about managing these things in a global, integrated approach, sometimes with several engines for the same functions, such as different flavors of process engines, different flavors of rule engines (e.g., rules for data validation, rules for complex-event processing, rules for business object state assessment, etc.) Governance, or global management, of models and policies is key to agility and cost effectiveness.
Bernard Debauche
VP EMEA Marketing
Axway Inc
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