Comments on: More thoughts on RuleBurst and Haley

By: Business Rules Market FUD « Commercial Intelligence

Business Rules Market FUD « Commercial Intelligence — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:49:47 +0000

[...] Vendor Shares[7] See comments to Consolidation Hits the Business Rules Market.[8] See comments to More thoughts on RuleBurst and Haley.[9] SAP buys BPM vendor to boost NetWeaver[10] Ibid.[11] Production Rule Representation (PRR) from [...]

By: Process vs. Decisions « Artificial Intelligence

Process vs. Decisions « Artificial Intelligence — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:32:41 +0000

[...] More thoughts on RuleBurst and Haley [...]

By: Paul Haley

Paul Haley — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:38:30 +0000

I don’t think that Ruleburst will have problems with the first of your bullets any longer, James. Haley has met the requirements of customers or Oracle, Countrywide, United Healthcare, Medco, etc. in high-value and highly-competitive sales. Haley has been an effective competitor within its limited presence (due to marketing and business development that have been weak relative to Ruleburst). With regard to natural language, Mr. Still has communicated a significant but distinguishing charactaristic of both companies that is a further synergy – the emphasis on a smooth flow from pre-IT capture, harvesting, and formalization of business requirements, regulations and policy through to implementation rather than publishing an IT-centric model through a more business accessible front-end (i.e., for rule authoring). These synnergies, one additive and the other emphatic and overlapping bode well for the combination.

With regard to OMG SBVR, Paul, you know I am a big fan. Authority was pretty far ahead of where SBVR landed up, imo, but SBVR is critically correct in separating semantics and logic from implmentation. Now all we need to do for SBVR is add langauge capabilities (e.g., real dictionaries and linguistic flexibility) plus logic generation for Rete Algorithm rules engines or logic programming systems…

One more thought on SBVR, Benjamin Grosof pinned the vendor panel at the Business Rules Forum with a question about interchange (e.g., using OMG PRR or W3C RIF). All of the vendors dismissed these standards as being inadequate for interropability given their higher level differences. I suspect that SBVR will be a more practical interroperability mechanism. Specifically, I think it is interesting to migrate between or from vendors via SBVR, including to open-source/free engines, such as Drools.

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:14:12 +0000

Its curious that the first “business rules” standard to be commissioned by a bona fide standards authority (ie OMG SBVR) addressed natural language specification of rules, without any participation (AFAIK) from these natural-language-approach BRE vendors. And generally the government-based market is very sensitive to standards compliance…

I wish Softlaw/RuleBurst/Haley good luck, too!