First Look: InRule 4.6 update

I last got an update on InRule back in 2011 with v4. They see four pillars to their Business Rules Management System:

• Rule Authoring
• Rule Storage and Management
• Rule Execution
• Rule Integration (SDK)

V4 focused on the rule authoring experience and since then they have had a couple of additional releases. 4.1 focused on improving the rule storage and management elements while 4.5, released last year, was a significant overhaul to the execution engine in terms of performance and memory management.

They have also been increasingly selling solutions with integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM at the core, especially in the government sector. They have provided both design-time integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (pulling all the CRM metadata in so rules can be easily written against it) and data integration so that data from the CRM system can easily be used for testing.

Most recently they have announced 4.6 has just come out with support for REST – both deploying InRule as REST services and allowing REST services  to be called from InRule. This reflects the move of their core audience to use a broader array of technologies even though they are focused on .Net. This allows, for instance, access to data exposed as a REST service and to package up a rule service for RESTful access. As part of their long term direction to support a heterogeneous environment where different elements are service-enabled and potentially cloud-deployed. In addition the catalog is now separately licensed to provide more flexibility in deployment.

InRule has also made it clear that they are moving to provide cloud support for clients so that they can develop using a mix of cloud and on-premise deployments, allowing clients to mix and match these approaches without a lot of technical issues. As part of this they are working with both cloud CRM solutions and with custom cloud deployments.

Later this year they also plan to release a JavaScript rule deployment to allow InRule rules to execute in lightweight and perhaps disconnected (mobile) environments.

InRule is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology Report and you can get more information on their product here.