Last week Forrester analysts Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer published a briefing on the “Future of Business Rules Platforms”, looking at the rules engines that have been so successful in providing business logic platforms for the BPM and SOA worlds. Their opinions are worth noting as they reflect what we are seeing in the marketplace… and their findings are somewhat given away in the report’s subtitle “Customers Are Moving To Event And Decision Management”…
Mike and John mention 2 patterns for CEP and business rule convergence:
- CEP can drive business rules via separate platforms. This is analagous to CEP (complex events) driving business processes and decisions as required, and where bolting CEP onto the front of mature BPM and SOA environments can make sense (note [1]).
- CEP can use rules to provide event pattern detection merged with business (decision) rules. This is the use of the same platform to provide an event-decision-action process (note [2]).
Notes.
[1] These patterns will be familiar to TIBCO customers through TIBCO BusinessEvents calling TIBCO BusinessWorks, and TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM calling TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager.
[2] Forrester also say, on the second pattern, “only Tibco is in a strong position to expand from use of rules to define event handlers into general business rules applications“!
