First Look Progress Corticon 5.4 Update

It’s been a while since I had an update on Progress Corticon – the last time was an update for v5.2 back in 2012.

Progress Corticon is a mainstream Business Rules Management System with the usual Corticon Studio, Corticon Server and Corticon Enterprise Data Connector. In addition there is the Corticon BRMS for OpenEdge, linking Corticon to the Progress OpenEdge product suite. The core product continues to be based around a decision table/rulesheet metaphor for business users. The validation and verification tools remain a strength and Progress Corticon can generate a decision service which runs on its rules engine. They also emphasize cross platform deployment with .Net and Java deployment support.

Progress acquired Corticon back in 2012 right as Progress was in the middle of some strategic changes. As a result of these changes Progress focused on the application development market, with a specific focus on cloud development and deployment. A large piece of Progress’ business comes from ISVs, specifically ISVs working with OpenEdge. As part of this strategy Corticon has really been integrated with other elements of the Progress development platform:

• Corticon 5.4 has been integrated with OpenEdge 11 to bring OpenEdge data structures in as a rules vocabulary and to make it easy to call decision services.
• Corticon’s Enterprise Data Connector uses the Progress DataDirect drivers. This gives Corticon access to a wide range of data sources from traditional databases to newer sources like MongoDB and SaaS servers (like Salesforce.com and Rollbase).
• Corticon has been integrated with the Rollbase PaaS development environment so that those working with Rollbase in a private cloud can access a Corticon deployment more easily.

The focus on working with both OpenEdge and Rollbase is a reflection of demand from their ISVs for more decision-driven application development. This has its roots in decision-centric industries like insurance of course but is more broadly based with everything from payroll to order management. More and more of these ISVs have a SaaS deployment mode and the ability to use business rules to offer flexible decisioning reduces the need for custom code and custom installs.

They have also updated the integration of Corticon 5.4 with the Tibco Process platform.

The other area of product enhancement for Corticon 5.4 was an improvement in the runtime diagnostics – using data about rule execution to help customers improve their execution performance and see where rules were being used. Testing and result comparison capabilities were updated, allowing the exclusion of data that is expected to vary like date and the suppression of minor variations below a threshold for instance. REST and JSON APIs were added and some general performance updates.

Progress Corticon 5.4 is released-details here.

Progress is one of the vendors in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report.