Business Rules Not Ruling Business Rules will play growing role in business processes, analysts say

By Jennifer deJong

May 15, 2006 —

It’s not quite mainstream, but business rules management technology is moving away from the margins.

Software that separates rules from the applications they govern is no longer just for rules-centric companies, such as those that issue insurance policies and process claims. It also plays an increasingly important role in any organization that wants to automate decisions within business processes, analysts said.

“Business rules are becoming part of the DNA of application development,” said Steve Hendrick, an analyst for IDC. “Business rules are effective for automating decisions within processes,” added Forrester Research analyst John Rymer, in a report published in January titled “The Forrester Wave: Business Rules Platforms.” According to Rymer, “They make it possible to change the business rules without breaking the application (or applications) that call it.”

Business rules spell out policies, such as which customers a bank will approve mortgages for, at what interest rate; or which drivers an auto insurance firm will underwrite, at what price. Instead of encoding such policies using a conventional programming technique, a business rules management system (BRMS) stores rules in a repository and executes them in an engine separate from the applications to which they apply. That enables developers and business users to revise or replace rules without having to alter an application’s source code.

“Rules aren’t embedded in the platform,” said James Taylor, a vice president of product management for Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac, which sells the BRMS Blaze Advisor, among other offerings. Centralized management means rules can work with multiple applications, much the same way a database does, he said.

“You can manage rules the same way you manage data,” added Jean-Francois Abramatic, chief product officer for Mountain View, Calif.-based ILOG, which sells JRules and other BRMS offerings.

BRMS makers like the database analogy. But if their offerings are to become as ubiquitous as database software, they have a long way to go. A survey conducted by IDC in 2005, which asked developers about various underlying technologies for building applications, found that less than 9 percent of those surveyed use rules-based management systems, said Hendrick. That number is expected to double over the next three years, he said. Forrester has yet to measure BRMS adoption rates formally, but it, too, sees a growing trend.

Key Building Block
The increase is largely due to the growing role rules play in apps built around business processes. Enterprise applications today include five basic building blocks, one of which is business rules, said IDC’s Hendrick.

The first is easy access to data. The second is support for messaging and eventing, which involves accessing real-time information, such as data generated by RFID devices, indicating, for example, that a palette of products has arrived at the warehouse, he said. The third is business rules, which specify what to do with the eventing data. The fourth building block is the ability to apply a process, such as a transaction, based on business rules. And the fifth is the ability to support a change of state. “When an airline reservation becomes a paid-for booking, it has changed state,” said Hendrick, offering an example.

IBM agreed that rules are gaining importance in business processes. “[Business rules technology] is evolving as a

management and business integration,” said Stephanie Wilkinson, manager of WebSphere product marketing for IBM. The company’s WebSphere Process Server does not include a rules engine, but it lets developers define business rules as part of the workflow process. That level of rules support is sufficient for 85 percent to 90 percent of IBM’s customers, Wilkinson said.

Microsoft also addresses rules in the larger-context business process management and integration. Its BizTalk integration server includes a full-blown rules engine, noted Steven Martin, a director of product management for Microsoft.

“All of the big vendors have dabbled in the business rules in some way,” added IDC’s Hendrick.

Competing Partners
“Like any technology, business rules become mainstream when the market at large recognizes the technology,” said ILOG’s Abramatic. “They have acknowledged that rules are important, and validate a trend,” added Fair Isaac’s Taylor, referring to Microsoft’s rules engine, as well as Oracle Business Rules, which is based on the Sandia Lab’s rules engine Jess. The presence of major players in the rules arena, as well as the growing importance of rules in managing business processes, is helping move BRMSes into the mainstream.

However, there is still a huge, untapped market of companies that don’t use rules engines yet, said Abramatic. “But business rules will become first-class citizens,” he predicted.

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