Red Hat drives value with the new JBoss Enterprise BRMS

Business analysts can now leverage open source to automate business decisions to help reduce costs and drive value Red Hat, Inc. announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System (BRMS), an open source business rules solution that enables easy business policy and rules development, access, and management. JBoss Enterprise BRMS allows customers to reduce development time to update applications and processes with the latest business rules and policies.

Automating business decisions with JBoss Enterprise BRMS can help a business to run faster and enable business process stakeholders the ability to rapidly implement change. Now, organizations can automate the delivery of customer-facing updates, promotions, loyalty programs, discounts, or payment terms among others, designed cut time to deployment with greater accuracy, and at a lower cost.

“In today's economic environment businesses must be able to quickly adapt and respond to regulations, customer trends, opportunities and threats,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business Unit, Red Hat. “JBoss Enterprise BRMS is designed to give our customers a competitive advantage in the marketplace by helping them increase revenue, offer relevant products and services faster and improve customer satisfaction, all while reducing their overall IT costs.”

Business rules are parameters that describe how an organization performs work. Best practices require business rules to be maintained separately from the software applications and services they govern in order to maximize agility. If business rules are duplicated or scattered across many applications, updates are costly, error prone, and take weeks or months to implement.

With JBoss Enterprise BRMS, enterprises can update their business rules to reflect the day-to-day business and regulatory environment as quickly as in a few hours or days. Additionally, JBoss Enterprise BRMS enables non-technical staff to manage the business process in an organization without programming.

“The combination of tight budgets, the increasing maturity of the BRMS, and the continual improvement of open source technologies creates a nearly perfect disruptive storm in the BRMS market”, said Stephen D. Hendrick, Group Vice President for Application Development and Deployment Research at IDC. “Open source BRMS products that get rule authoring, processing, and management right combined with a significantly lower TCO will receive a strong positive reception in the market.”

“From increased regulatory requirements to market pressures, the ability for organizations to rapidly respond and modify business rules is paramount. As a service provider we consistently strive to provide innovative and world-class solutions to our customers, Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise BRMS solution will allow us give our customers an easy to use automated business rules system that will take their businesses to the next level,” said Tom Stack, vice president, Ubiquitous Solutions.

JBoss Enterprise BRMS is an enterprise-ready open source business rules management system. When deployed with other JBoss Enterprise Middleware such as JBoss Enterprise SOA and Portal Platforms, Red Hat expects that organizations will be able to create better customer experiences by delivering up-to-date service, support and product faster and with higher quality.

Key JBoss Enterprise BRMS features include:

* Business Rules Engine – The rules engine is highly flexible and can be embedded within a wide variety of enterprise applications and business processes. Rules can be updated through a range of tools, from editors and spreadsheets to Eclipse and Web 2.0 business analyst friendly tools, enabling greater business agility.

* Web 2.0 Rules Authoring and Management Tools – The Rich Internet Application (RIA) user interface provides a user-friendly environment for business rule authoring and editing, versioning and deployment management. Designed for business analysts and process owners to craft and update rule sets supporting their business processes, the tools extend the value delivered to a wider audience of enterprise stakeholders beyond the Java developers.

* BRMS Repository – The repository enables version control of business rules artifacts, including fact models, enumerations, functions, domain specific languages (DSL) definitions, rules and tests. The BRMS repository provides the foundation for the Web 2.0 and other management tools that deliver business agility not possible with traditional enterprise and web application deployments.

The introduction of JBoss Enterprise BRMS is a significant addition to Red Hat’s overall middleware software strategy to offer a comprehensive portfolio of middleware products that solves application development, deployment and integration challenges. In addition to JBoss Enterprise BRMS, Red Hat’s open source middleware portfolio includes JBoss application platforms, SOA platforms, portal platforms, software development tools and specialized middleware offerings to address application needs. Together these open source middleware products provide an alternative to costly propriety middleware, which can help companies to confidently and securely reduce IT costs while gaining operational flexibility.