Open Source

I recently published a First Look on the open source OpenRules Decision Management System. Along with traditional Business Rules components, OpenRules includes two other important decision management components: Rules Solver for solving optimization problems Rule Learner for predictive analytics. OpenRules Rule Solver is based on Constraint Programming (CP) technology, that is typically used in scheduling, [...]

I recently got a briefing from Information Builders, an independent business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information integration/management (EIM) vendor founded in 1975. They sell their BI and EIM solutions separately, though they are increasingly selling these solutions together. They have 1,350 employees and 12,000 customer sites as well as a strong OEM portfolio. They find [...]

As promised when I was blogging from the Object Management Group standards meeting, I caught up with OpenRules recently. OpenRules was founded in 2003 by people who had previously developed a business rules management system. Their immediate focus was on business analysts and on empowering subject matter experts to build business rules with minimal IT [...]

Drools Planner is a sub project of the Drools project that started 4 years ago as Drools Solver. Drools Planner is focused on “NP complete” planning problems where a solution is hard to find, but easy to prove feasible once found. Examples include scheduling, bin packing and timetabling for instance. Drools Planner is particularly good [...]

Jacob Feldman presented to the Object Management Group Decision Modeling Notation meeting on OpenRules – an open source “decision management system”. Jacob argues that OpenRules is a Decision Management System for a number of reasons – besides having a rule engine and a rule engine it also supports automated rule discovery, predictive analytics, an optimization [...]

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]

I was presenting this week to a company that asked what trends I saw in business rules. I had my ow thoughts but I also reached out to some other experience business rules implementers. Here’s what we came up with: A broader context for business rules Business rules are increasingly adopted as part of a [...]

I got my first chance to catch up with Calpont recently. Calpont is a privately held company based in Frisco TX with 25 employees. They have been developing their analytics database technology over the past 2.5 years. InfiniDB Enterprise is the commercial product released in February 2010 and InfiniDB GPL version was launched in October [...]

We are wrapping up our webinar series on decision management and I wanted to make sure you knew about the three remaining webinars. These webinars are a great tool for you to learn more about predictive analytics, business rules and decision management in practice. There are more details on the events page but the three [...]

Claye Greene and Kristy Sanders of Technology Blue are giving a webinar on Best practices for using JBoss Drools on November 16th, 2010 at 10am Pacific. Open source has proven to be a valuable solution for companies looking to lower implementation costs of software solutions. A few years ago open source Decision Management solutions were [...]

I got my first chance to catch up with the folks at Cloudera recently. Founded in 2008 Cloudera has nothing really to do with “cloud” and focuses instead on “big data” – helping organizations capture, integrate and analyze new sources of detailed business data. Cloudera like to describe themselves as the RedHat for Hadoop – [...]

I got an update from the folks at Alfresco recently. This company is an open source content management project, begun by a team that left Documentum some years ago. The project now has about 2M downloads and is a commercial open source company with 1,200 paying customers – mostly among those typically comfortable with open [...]

I have blogged about Pervasive DataRush before and I got a quick update this week. Pervasive often talks about helping companies with “big data” issues and they see this as one dimension of difficulty – with the complexity of processing being done being the other dimension. So some folks, for instance, handle big data but [...]

I got my first formal briefing from REvolution Computing recently. REvolution has been around for about 2 years. Originally they focused on bringing parallel computing power to R and providing some consulting around the language. They raised some new funding recently and now have a new management team, including CEO Norman Nie (co-founder of SPSS) [...]

Lisa posted an interesting comment on an old post of mine (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)) in which she make some interesting comments: I understand your last point that using a declarative “model” such business rules would be preferable to replace legacy COBOL applications instead of using a procedural language. [...]

I got a chance to catch up with the folks from Red Hat recently. I have reviewed the new functionality that Mark Proctor and his team have been adding to turn the old Drools rule engine into a competitive Business Rules Management System or BRMS when the latest release came out. This time we chatted [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Today is the official release day for the new release of JBoss Enterprise BRMS – Drools 5.0 as was. Key features in this release are the repository/repository management tools and the new features that let business users and business analysts participate directly in editing the rules. Craig Muzilla, the VP Middleware Business [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ With Drools 5, JBoss and the open source community have delivered a true business rules management system for the first time. Using Drools, organizations can take control of the logic that drives their operational decisions using an open source platform. Some time ago I wrote a little forward for Paul Browne and [...]

I got a second look at VNI’s product this week – I took a first look last year. VNI has been continuing to OEM its products to folks from around the world. Their customers are in many different areas like Investor Analytics (SaaS for financial risk management optimization), Moore Nanotechnology Systems machinery and RiskMetrics Group [...]