One of the first major application infrastructure vendors to lend weight to the value of business rules management systems, BEA’s move signifies the credence now being given to the technology – formerly confined predominantly to academia and some niche uses in the likes of logistics and discrete manufacturing.
Business rules engines enable companies to use software to automate the rules that govern every business process, from insurance claims processing to web site personalization techniques. Many of these rules were formerly hard-coded in legacy application logic, such as mainframe systems and Cobol. Business rules engines offer the ability to model, define, deploy and subsequently manage these business rules in a more standards-based and reusable fashion.
BEA said it has chosen Ilog’s JRules offering to help create faster business response times for WebLogic Workshop customers in finance, insurance, telecom and government markets as part of the combined solution. This is because Ilog JRules is designed to help eliminate the need to make business policy changes to a BPM application through traditional software coding, the companies said.
Using Ilog JRules integrated with the WebLogic Workshop framework, developers can create policy-based services orchestrated by BEA Workshop Process Workflow. Building services based on Ilog JRules can help enable a higher degree of reusability because business rules can be customized to fit different business processes and invocation contexts, and can also be shared across multiple applications or services, according to the companies.
We’re collaborating with Ilog because they have a strong commitment to standards and to the developer community; and because Ilog JRules help provide the enterprise scope and integration ease required by our BEA WebLogic Workshop customers, said Scott Edgington, BEA VP and general manager of worldwide channels and alliances.
Ilog JRules is designed to integrate with BEA Workshop Process Workflow using a connector called Ilog Control, available free from both companies.
Competition in the business rules engine space is stiff and getting stiffer, with companies competing for mind- and market-share including Fair Isaac, Computer Associates, Hailey, ESI, Everest (a Pink Roccade company), and others.
