Jim Sinur

Back in November, I gave some history of the power vendors attitude towards business rules(see http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/11/18/ibm-microsoft-oracle-and-sap-have-bought-business-rule-technology-whats-up-with-that/) After some more detailed interaction with Oracle on the topic, I have some new insights for you. Oracle has an abundance of rule engines, so it might appear that there is no overall business rule strategy. The purposed strategy is to leave it up to each related product groups. Within each of the following areas there is a strategy and/or a repeated behavior pattern that implies a strategy. The good news for those of us that are interested in process, the rules strategy is growing to a solid state in the 11G product line (due out this summer). Let’s examine rule usage in each of the three areas of Oracles business

Applications:

Oracle has a minimum three business rule engines in this area of their business (Logical Apps, Haley and RuleBurst). Each of these BREs are leveraged to provide agility in specific applications and came aboard in separate events. While Haley looks to be a recent addition, it was used in a number of Oracle owned applications previously. The recent acquisition of RuleBurst (which brought Haley on board) was specifically purposed to get into new application areas where there were existing domain components and rules that could be applied to expand Oracles application business. An expansion move for sure.

Process and Infrastructure: Now for the good news

While one could argue that Oracles wrapped JESS based rule engine is not the best one in Oracles inventory of BREs, but it is more than sufficient. Oracle is upping its usability and penetration into Oracles BPM offering. I was given an advanced demo of the interaction of Oracle BPM and their advancing rule engine and I came away pleased. This BRE is pervasive in most, if not all, of the process components and it is much easier to use than ever before. With the addition of decision tables and rule modeling/evaluation, the rule engine is something that a trained business analyst could use. In addition there were aspects of a budding business rule management system (BRMS) that included major aspects of change control and rule packaging. I was pleasantly surprised and excited about hearing from Beta users later this year.

BI and Data

Oracle leverages at least one internally written rules capability to support their Business Intelligence efforts. From my initial evaluation this is a weak capability compared to the other rule capabilities under the Oracle banner.

Being somewhat process focused I am encouraged by the leverage of Oracles mainstream business rules engine and some helpful rules management, but I always want more. I would love to see a common business rules management solution that would span Oracles stove pipes at a minimum.