New Research on Business Rules from Forrester

John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri of Forrester have published two interesting new reports on business rules – The Future Of Business Rules Platforms and Market Overview: Business Rules Platforms 2011. The first of these is a short piece emphasizing the growing role of business rules management systems in event processing and in Decision Management.

Both pieces are worth checking out if you are in the rules business or actively considering business rules as a development technology. The Market Overview has a great diagram showing how business rules, business events, business process and analytics are all coverging at some level. The report gives some good analysis of the market – steady growth with more maturity as big players acquire or develop solid business rules capabilities. John and Mike also give a nice overview of the various players and their status, though they don’t really talk about SAP or Oracle much (even though both have a business rules capability, especially SAP with its BRFplus ABAP rules engine). Both reports also explicitly mention Decision Management as part of the growth of business rules along with a focus on business rules/events in combination.

I think the best summary is the recommendation they make at the end of the market overview “Stop Coding All Your Business Rules In Java, C#, Cobol, Et Al”.

Don’t forget you can see the list of business rules (and other) vendors I have reviewed on the Decision Management Solutions Technology Map – just go to the list of business rules management systems.