IDC’s Stephen Hendrick gave the keynote on the 2nd day of BRForum, titled “BRMS at a Crossroads”. The gist of Stephen’s talk was the need for BRMSs to evolve to the next level. Interestingly this seemed to be the first conference mention of “cloud computing” – a welcome respite from the hype about remote deployment platforms – as “cloud” was one of the future trends that businesses needed to exploit, along with open source, visualization platforms, and, naturally, decision management…
Stephen started with an overview (based on IDC research) of the BRMS market: in 2008 this was worth $285M with a “10.5%” annual growth, with the 2 leading BRMS vendors taking 40% of that market. Of the 7 BRMS vendors he mentioned, TIBCO was rated as being joint 2nd due to its “strong legacy in rules and being well positioned to execute”…
He then introduced the “IDC Decision Framework”: measuring the “scope of decision” vs “degree of automation” vs “no of decisions” vs “level of collaboration” for any application area.
Onto the vision of a future Decision Management platform: this needs better “data preparation” (which maybe means MDM) and “decision refinement” (covering predictive analytics). But CEP events needed to drive the decisions, whose decisioning context was defined as handled by “state“. All these management constructs obviously mapped to a runtime platform for “active decisioning” / “always on” behavior…
Justifying the CEP connection, Stephen mentioned that in 2008 at least 20% of BRMS/decisioning deals had some kind of “real time” orientation which was expensive to handle in the “passive BRE” environments.
The key concept Stephen described was the move from the “process centric to information centric” approach. Sharp intake of breath from the BPM community present… however Stephen explained that fine-grain rule and event control and parallel processing were key, and useful, features of the CEP world.
Stephen ended with the comment that “cloud computing” will also be event-driven – so decision management platforms that are event-based will makes sense in the cloud deployment world. [And funnily enough, CEP certainly plays a role in TIBCO’s Silver cloud offering].
From a TIBCO perspective, clearly the concept of state management and modeling, with event processing, decision management, MDM and analytics are all part of the “best practice” decision platform. Probably the “information centric” world will not replace the “process centric” world any time soon, but for those customers want to take this route, its good to know there are already vendor solutions…
