News

Corticon Java/.NET Business Rules Management System Updated

• By John K. Waters
• June 9, 2015

Progress Software Corp. released the latest version of its Corticon business rules management system (BRMS). Dubbed the "Corticon Rules Without Limits System," version 5.5 of the BRMS supports the development of business rules for deployment on both Java and Microsoft .NET Framework platforms.

"Today many corporate IT departments have a mix of .NET and Java environments, driving the need for a BRMS that supports both developer communities," said Dr. Mark Allen, vice president, Decision Analytics at Progress, in a statement.

BRMSs separate business rules from code, allowing both IT and the so-called business developers (non-developer developers) to create or modify automated business rules with little or no coding. As the company explained it in a statement, "By separating decisions from processes, the Corticon system helps both business and IT users quickly create or reuse business rules. Moreover, business analysts can identify, automate and deploy business rules and decision systems in collaboration with IT, without the need for expensive custom coding."

In a study of the BRMS market between 2011 and 2013, IDC analyst Al Hilwa concluded, "The business rules management systems market continues to grow as organizations look for ways to achieve application development productivity and agility. BRMS tools are also being embedded in business process management software at a greater degree than ever."

Hilwa says the BRMS space continues to grow, and IDC will soon release a new set of forecasts for that market.

"The BRMS market is expected to post a compound annual growth rate of 5.6% for 2014–2019, which is pretty healthy," Hilwa told ADTmag. "There are a number of players this space such as FICO, IBM, CA and Oracle, but the category as a whole is still in the process of embracing cloud technology more aggressively." He added, "I think Corticon is a solid offering in this space, and it's great to see Progress put more investment in the technology, both in terms of R&D and marketing."

Progress Software acquired Corticon Technologies and its patented rules engine in 2011. Traditional rules engines use a pattern-matching Rete algorithm to execute rules, but Corticon employs its own Design-time Interfacing (DeTI) engine, which, as the company explains it, "shifts the inferencing workload from runtime to design time, producing more efficient and reliable decisions." Corticon provides a spreadsheet-like modeling tool that would be familiar to most business users.

The list of new features in Corticon 5.5 includes: rule flow branching, which allows users to visualize complex decision services and large rule flows; adaptive and reusable rule flows, which offers a modular approach for easier rule flow creation; improved thread pooling for decision service execution and support for auto-scaling; a new high-performance logging subsystem, which makes it possible to use log files as an audit trail for runtime execution; and a REST API for server management of custom control over server configuration and deployment.