John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri of Forrester have published two interesting new reports on business rules – The Future Of Business Rules Platforms and Market Overview: Business Rules Platforms 2011. The first of these is a short piece emphasizing the growing role of business rules management systems in event processing and in Decision Management. The second is a more wide ranging overview of the business rules market.
Both pieces are worth checking out if you are in the rules business or actively considering business rules as a development technology. The Market Overview has a great diagram showing how business rules, business events, business process and analytics are all coverging at some level. The report gives some good analysis of the market – steady growth with more maturity as big players acquire or develop solid business rules capabilities. John and Mike also give a nice overview of the various players and their status, though they don’t really talk about SAP or Oracle much (even though both have a business rules capability, especially SAP with its BRFplus ABAP rules engine). Both reports also explicitly mention Decision Management as part of the growth of business rules along with a focus on business rules/events in combination.
I think the best summary is the recommendation they make at the end of the market overview “Stop Coding All Your Business Rules In Java, C#, Cobol, Et Al”.
Don’t forget you can see the list of business rules (and other) vendors I have reviewed on the Decision Management Solutions Technology Map – just go to the list of business rules management systems.
