Vendor announcements today seem to have a sci-fi theme: first it was IDS Scheer and Microsoft with the Alliance, and now it’s Corticon with the Foundation: the Business Rules Foundation, that is. I had a sneak preview last week with David Straus, Corticon’s SVP of Marketing, who did the most amazing thing for a guy with the word “marketing” in the title (much less an SVP): about a minute into our phone call, he said “wait, I can show you”, fired up Webex, sent me an invitation, and 2 minutes later he was giving me a product demo.
Corticon’s Studio product is a pretty capable business rules management system, and one of the 3 or 4 standard systems that ends up integrated into everything else, such as BPM suites that lack their own rules engines. You can define rules in a natural language, then use a decision table to map those rules onto conditions and actions, check for ambiguities and generate unconsidered cases. You can save a set of rules as a compiled service to run within their engine or to be called as a web service. You can even import (or create) test data to run against the rules, with the tests showing which rules were triggered in order to explain the decision. So far, so good: standard functionality with some nice features.
What they’ve announced today, however, is a version that separates the underlying services from the user interface, and allows those services to be embedded and tightly bound inside another application. The SDK opens up the ability for any application vendor to embed Corticon’s rules capabilities within their product without having to use any of Corticon’s user interface: they can create their own user interface paradigm for rules definition and integrate this with other parts of their appliation, so that the user is unaware that they are using software from two different vendors. The first big example of this is IDS Scheer’s ARIS, which embeds the Corticon Foundation (essentially) inside its ARIS Business Rules Designer: I saw this demonstrated at the IDS Scheer user conference a few weeks ago, but didn’t realize what I was seeing (although I knew that it was Corticon within ARIS).
Although the decision tables on the right look very much like the standard Corticon product, it’s completely and seamlessly housed within the framework of ARIS: that’s the ARIS repository tree view on the left. Since all of the new Corticon Studio is Eclipse-based, and most of the partner companies are using some sort of Eclipse tooling for their UI, this is a relatively painless integration.
There’s some other interesting applications for this that Straus mentioned, such as Adobe integration for dynamic document creation (e.g., for contract creation with rules-based selection of clauses), and Microsoft Word integration. With it opening up for development as of the announcement today, I’m sure that there will soon be a number of other application vendors trying it out. I’m waiting for the BPM vendors to start embedding this within their process designers instead of the paltry expression builders that most of them have: this seamless integration of business rules with business processes would eliminate the current barriers to using business rules in a BPM environment.
What Corticon is after, of course, is the Holy Grail of business rules: a common rules repository within an organization that is invoked by any enterprise application requiring a decision (think cross-organization compliance). By making it easier to integrate rules directly into any application, they may be that much closer.