First Look: Red Hat JBoss BRMS and Drools community project Update

I got an update on Red Hat JBoss BRMS recently. I last wrote about them with release 5.2 back in 2011 and JBoss BRMS 5.3 is the current release and includes their support for business rules, business process and event processing (based on the Drools and jBPM open source community projects) with a repository, runtime engines, web-based authoring, governance and a set of Eclipse-based development tools.

With release 6.0, Red Hat is planning to integrate Polymita (a BPM suite acquired last year) and JBoss BRMS. This will allow them to release a separate Business Rules Management System – JBoss BRMS 6 – that supports business rules and event processing as well as a new combined product supporting BPMS/BRMS called Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.

With release 6.0 Red Hat JBoss BRMS will continue to provide “classic” BRMS capabilities:

• It will support business and developer authoring tools that share a repository.
• Support deployment for event processing and rules execution.
• Consumes business data and real-time event feeds at runtime
• Provides decisions to client applications.

There are also plans to add new capabilities, including:

• Inclusion of the JBoss Drools 6.0 project runtime which includes lots of work on performance and execution tuning.
• OptaPlanner for resource scheduling problems is now included as a technology preview (the evolution of the Drools Planner project).
• New repository architecture based on git for source control (in place of JCR) to allow easier integration of rules development with general IT development as well as providing new features.
• UberFire to allow authoring tools to be shared between Eclipse and the web while also improving the user interface for business users and increasing collaboration.

From a go-to-market perspective Red Hat is focusing on automating decisions (Decision Management), empowering business users, accelerating application development and transitioning to the cloud (as part of the new xPaaS) announcements. Their targets are business-focused Decision Management projects, more general application development where complex logic is a big issue and real-time data analysis focused on event processing.

JBoss BPM Suite 6.0 includes all the BRMS 6.0 as well as new features from Polymita such as dashboards/reporting (including Business Activity Monitoring), data modeling, a forms designer, simulation based on the BPSim standard and improved authoring tools for business users.

The xPaaS announcement will include the option to buy the BRMS (and BPM Suite) products through OpenShift service provisioning. It is not clear how this will change the pricing but the clear intent is to move to consumption pricing v core-based pricing for on-premise.

Red Hat is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report and you can get more information on Red Hat JBoss BRMS at redhat.com/brms