First Look – Progress Corticon Update

Progress Corticon Business Rules Management System (BRMS) v5.2 was delivered in February and focused on key enhancements for natural language support, mobility, and Progress Software integration.  Since the first version nearly a decade ago, Corticon has focused on offering easy-to-use tools to express and manage decision making logic.  The Corticon business rules expression language is based on OMG’s OCL.  While this does not require programming skills to learn, it does require a few days of training for business analysts.  With v5.2, the Corticon rule language can now be mapped to natural language.  This enables business people, with no training in Corticon, to understand the business rules.  Additionally, Corticon now allows the business rules to be managed in natural language via the web or iOS (iPad, iPhone) interfaces. Additionally, Corticon v5.2 offers enterprise grade batch processing, enhanced XML messaging, and improved integration with Progress Savvion BPM and Apama BEP.

Beyond that, Progress Corticon will deliver a Web  based studio with global search and replace, as well as common repository technology across the Progress products and more integration that supports  a common object model across Apama, Corticon and Savvion.

From a decision management perspective, Progress Corticon provides the core decision logic management capabilities as well as some ability to solve constraint optimization problems.  The Progress RPM (Responsive Process Management) platform includes Progress Savvion Business Process Management (BPM) for executing decisions within the context of business processes, Progress Apama Business Event Processing (BEP) for monitoring events to make decisions at the earliest possible moment in time and Progress Control Tower to visual real-time information, including the results of decision processing.  Progress supports predictive analytics through third party integration.

In addition to providing RPM, Progress provides a number of vertical solution accelerators in Banking, Capital Markets, Supply Chain Management and Telecommunications. One of the solution accelerators sold to Banking and Telecom called Responsive Customer Engagement (RCE) illustrates the use of Progress RPM to deliver a next-best action marketing solution.  RCE monitors real-time event flows (including location and prior action) to determine what marketing offer to make a customer, and then sends the offer via mobile or web protocols.  Progress Control Tower allows typical dashboard views of data such as campaign performance, number of offers made etc. It also allows integration with business processes, allowing a new campaign process to be kicked off in context for instance. Screens in the process for data entry can be displayed and used to enter data. Approvals and completeness checks can be part of these processes and the Control Tower displays approval steps for the relevant approver. New elements, new portlets, can be added easily and live during operation. These could include, for instance, decision performance analytics or analytics on rule execution. The need for approval is driven by a decision task, using Corticon business rules.  Additionally, Corticon determines what offer to make the customer, executing a predictive model as a part of that decision to increase lift.  In this case the predictive model was created using KXEN, which predicts propensity to accept the offers based on prior similar customer behavior.  Corticon executes the predictive model while also considering other business rules such as availability, profitability and regulatory acceptability of the offer.

In summary, Corticon BRMS continues to be enhanced by Progress and is being combined with the Progress RPM suite. Progress is also continuing Corticon’s work on integrating predictive analytics with the BRMS. More information can be found at http://www.progress.com/corticon.

Progress is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report.