Comments on: The Business Rule Market is Dead; Long Live Business Rules

By: Neil Raden

Neil Raden — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:16:53 +0000

I’m a little late to this conversation (about a year) but I think decisioning is a little too narrow. After all, the monster market now is search, and people (and machines) don’t use search to make decisions, they use it to get informed. BRE’s sort of walked away from their AI roots when they dropped question answering, but I see this as a huge market for BRE’s, especially if they incorporate some NLP and semantic reasoning. Not taking anything away from decisioning, but it’s just a piece of the puzzle.

-NR

By: Bernard Debauche

Bernard Debauche — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:17:56 +0000

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

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:19:12 +0000

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

By: Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:33:37 +0000

The BRMS will actively support the Intelligent Decidion Management and the BPM markets activel , but decisioning is the big fish in hte long run.

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:45:08 +0000

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