ILOG taking Rules further

ILOG has come up with rules for COBOL. I came to know about this a while back, but ran into this post by Daniet Selman (ILOG JRules Rule Studio Lead).

The effort for rules extraction from Legacy systems have been in place for quite sometime now. Rules For COBOL approaches in a different way.

The advantage with this approach is that enterprises can divide-and-conquer their legacy modernization, incrementally externalizing their business rules from COBOL applications and moving them into the BRMS. They can continue to execute the rules as COBOL minimizing the disruption to their system infrastructure.

Interesting. Now gotta learn mainframe to check this out.

Bright Future For BPMS

Guest blooger Gib Bassett at EDM Blog writes about Gartner Predictions for 2008.

Gartner recently issued two “Predicts: 2008” reports highlighting their expectations for Enterprise Architecture and the Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) Market. Both recognize noteworthy and highly complementary trends reflecting the value of Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), particularly Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) supporting EDM principles.

I do not have the financial muscle to purchase the report. Here are some snippets from Gib's post.

“Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2012, the BPMS technology market will subsume greater than 80% of the pure-play business rule technology sector (for example, stand-alone business rule engines).”[...]

Gartner goes on to make two final points worth mentioning:

“Due to the increasing need to model rules and business processes simultaneously, it is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain separate rules and process repositories.”

And

“Enterprises need to understand the consequences of not managing rules and processes with a shared metamodel, as well as the effects this will have on their ability to create dynamic business models.”

Read more >>

Drools Vs ILOG

I have been working with rule based systems for quite a while now.

Having seen Pega and ILOG, BRMS field always interests me. Though I had heard about Drools sometime back, I never got a chance to have a look at it. Recently, I was looking at some articles where comparisons where made between Drools and ILOG and it's quite interesting.

Here are two links to refer to:

Drools Vs Jrules Performance and Future R&D(here) in Drools blogs and Academic Benchmark Performace(here) in ILOG BRMS Blogs.

I do not want to compare it myself till I use Drools. But here is a comment by Ellen N. Zhao on JBoss Drools vs ILog JRules - an anecdotal story(here):

Commercial software is of inherently lower quality than comparable open-source software, because it is developed by people who are paid for writing software, instead of people who are fascinated about finding the best solution. -- Dirk Farin: Automatic Video Segmentation

I have used ILOG and have found it good. The sheer simplicity in creating Business Object models is amazing and thus making process of writing rules much faster. Migrating rules have been a pain. I need to see Drools.