9/7/2012
Stephen Colbert coined the term Truthiness in 2005. Wikipedia summarizes Truthiness as “a quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”
There’s a little bit of truthiness going on regarding Business Rule Management Systems for .NET.
Truth
Earlier this year IBM formally announced it was withdrawing support for WebSphere ILOG Rules for .NET (IBM United States Withdrawal Announcement 912-058).
This was no surprise; we predicted this when IBM acquired ILOG in 2008. Our predictions were validated each year that IBM made no investment in ILOG for .NET. And this makes sense: IBM’s mission is to grow adoption of their JAVA based Websphere platform.
Similarly, Progress is seeking to drive adoption of its JAVA-based stack by adding BRMS capabilities. We predict the same scenario will play with Corticon and Progress. Progress may say that they will continue to support and enhance the product, but the proof will be in the pudding. Are they investing in (A) their .NET product or (B) integrating Corticon into the Progress stack. History says option B.
Truthiness
FICO commented that “IBM recently announced that it was requiring .NET users of its Websphere ILOG JRules business rules management solution to migrate to Java.” Not true—IBM is merely dropping support for the .NET product. FICO is also trying to capitalize on IBM’s news to position Blaze Advisor as a viable, even leading .NET alternative. That’s truthiness.
The truth is that from a capability perspective FICO Blaze Advisor is not a leading Business Rule Management System for .NET or any other platform. In its “Market Overview: Business Rules Platforms 2011,” Forrester rated FICO “Moderate to weak” in “Momentum and Positioning.” The reason? “We don’t see FICO investing in an architectural/technology refresh of Blaze Advisor.”1
InRule Technology continually invests in InRule, delivering the industry’s leading rule authoring environment. InRule’s authoring environment has the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office with integration with Microsoft Word, making it intuitive for business users without compromising sophistication or flexibility. InRule is written in 100% managed code by .NET developers for .NET developers. It’s what we call our “.NET-ness”: InRule’s deep leverage and support of.NET capabilities and integration with Visual Studio, which makes working with InRule familiar and straight forward for .NET developers. No other business rule technology can compare. It’s this continual reinvestment in InRule that gives us the “Strong” Momentum and Positioning rating from Forrester.
Leverage Truth
At InRule Technology, we believe in empowering the business to update and deploy rules without programmer intervention. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “We are Business Rules and So Can You.” The truth is that only one BRMS vendor is pure .NET. And only one vendor was named the .NET leader by Forrester. That Vendor is InRule Technology. “InRule Technology Rules the .NET Platform.”1
Be Decisive. Leverage Truth. Get Results.
1 Market Overview: Business Rules Platforms 2011, Forrester Research, Inc., July 2011