Service Oriented (SOA) Business Rules Management Systems Analyst Report
This report is a detailed business and technical comparison of three business rules management systems (BRMSs): Blaze Advisor from Fair Isaac Inc., JRules from ILOG SA and HaleyAuthority from Haley Systems Inc. The foci of the report are the business benefits that potential users may obtain and the ease of use by business analysts and users. Eight other products, eliminated from the shortlist, are covered briefly. Businesses continue to strive for shorter time to market and to lower the cost of developing and maintaining computer applications to support their operations. Business rules management technologies can play an important role in this. We should emphasize again that the report looks at BRMS products from a business user's and business analyst's perspective. From this point of view, the principles that such users care about are:
- Ease of Understanding
- Not requiring programming expertise
- Ease of use and expression of rules.
In the report, we examine the features and responsibilities of a BRMS and then the benefits of and business drivers for adoption of the technology. We list typical applications and indicators of the need for a BRMS. Next we cover the key technical features of a BRMS.
A multi-attribute feature analysis gave Haley Expert Rules the highest score: 84% of the maximum possible score. Blaze Advisor came second with 70%. JRules scored 66%. However, our deeper analysis reveals that each product is suitable for quite different classes of application. We conclude that HaleyAuthority provides the best solution for organizations that wish to use business analysts and users in rule creation and maintenance. This applies to a wide range of rulebased application types. We were most impressed by HaleyAuthority's genuine natural language syntax for the rules and its totally transparent code generation. It also scores well in terms of price, performance and memory utilization.
Along with service oriented architectures and component-based development, business rules management systems are an essential component of modern agile businesses. They vastly reduce the problems associated with the evolution of complex and volatile business strategies and policies. We identified three -class BRMS products that can be used within a component based development organization. All three products are capable of delivering effective solutions. However, there are a number of factors that discriminate among them. Haley provided the largest and most realistic demos. I tried one of them, a system to approve tax credits, in all three products and concluded that setting up a large rule base was faster in Haley HaleyAuthority than either of the other two products. The most time-consuming of the three was JRules, but for a skilled Java programmer, building on an existing object model, this may be much better. I also exercised a Haley demo that showed what could be done in terms of effective dates and was impressed.
JRules, Blaze Advisor and HaleyAuthority all have the features needed to support projects: multiple views of the same rules, rapid code deployment for various installations, easily maintainable code, version control, structured user access, excellent debugging tools, and English like rule-building languages that makes maintaining rules easy for developers if not for business analysts and users. Haley's natural language approach is far superior to that of either of its competitors in that respect.
Both JRules and HaleyAuthority can be used to implement Morgan's recommendations on rule syntax and style but it is a lot easier to do this in HaleyAuthority. If performance is a significant factor then JRules will be preferred over Blaze Advisor and Haley scores even higher than JRules in this respect. Similarly, if execution on small memory devices (e.g. PDAs, embedded systems) is critical then you will tend towards the Haley solution, followed by ILOG and then Blaze Advisor. All three products have weaknesses as well as strengths. For Blaze Advisor, these are the need to understand the technology, price and performance. For JRules, the highly technical nature of the product will deter many organizations from adopting it. None of the three products should be adopted without training.
This report does not conclude that any one product is better than any other. It merely sets out the relative strengths and weakness of the three products and considers their suitability for different types of application. As a consultant, I will be able happily to recommend all three products in the future - if they match the business and technical problems to be addressed and are to be deployed in an appropriate organizational culture.