Events

InRule Technology sees "Tomorrow as Today" for Rules at the Business Rules Forum
Held October 23-25, Lake Buena Vista, FL

InRule Technology was delighted to participate as a sponsor and presenter at the 2007 Business Rules Forum - kudos to Ron Ross, Gladys Kim et al for what we saw as the best BRF yet.

The theme "Enterprise Decisioning Comes Of Age" was compelling and reflects that rules technology is now a source of agility and competitive advantage.

The BRF confirmed market research data:
More and more organizations are deploying additional mission critical applications on .NET.

• IDC's "Mission Critical Study" (October 2006) states that 42.3% of their mission critical applications run on Windows Server vs. 30.5% on Unix and 35.7% of mission critical applications run on the .NET platform vs. J2EE (25.3%).
• IDC reports that the Windows portion of the BRMS market is larger and predicts that it will grow 50% faster on Windows than on Unix.
  2005-2010 CAGR:
  Windows 21.1%
  UNIX 15.6%
  From BRMS report published September 2006
  
  

Business Intelligence and Business Rules

One attendee noted that he had always been interested in business intelligence systems but couldn't find any compelling ways to work with them, other than basic data validation and transformation. However, after attending a BRF session he was excited about some of the examples discussed:

• Example 1: a manual insurance claims process. There is probably a manual of policies and procedures that was introduced to the claims adjusters during their training process.  That manual can be encoded in a rules system and then used to reprocess the claims.  The resulting data can be placed in a BI system to perform an analysis.  One might find issues with your current policies or a case where one office is interpreting the rules one way and another office a different way.
• Example 2: perform complex what-if analyses.  For example, a credit-card company might contemplate raising their auto-approve level for disputes from $15 to $18.  They can reprocess the disputes from the past year with the new level and see if they would get the results they are expecting.

InRule Technology Presentations at the BRF
Theresa O'Neil was joined by Kavita Kamani, a Microsoft Program Manager, for an early morning session titled "Rules and Workflow: Better Together."   The audience was engaged and found the session to be very useful.

Rik Chomko sat on a vendor panel titled "BRE: Hype and Reality", chaired by IDC analyst Steve Hendrick. Rik's input to the discussion really resonated with the audience, in particular answers to questions on standards and on the performance of BREs compared to code.

• An audience member stated his concern that putting rules and calculations into a BRE would perform slower than writing those same rules and calculations in code. In Rik's response, he explained how in most cases a BRE will actually outperform a hard-coded application:  Most BREs work by creating a network of rule and calculation dependencies and how they relate to each other; this information is used by the rule engine to determine the most optimal path for execution.  This "dependency network" almost always has a much better understanding of the various parts of the calculation and rule conditions and actions and therefore can intelligently avoid unnecessary processing.
  
  InRule Technology performed a comparison of BRE versus a hard-coded approach at a client site.  The client is a large insurance broker that needed to encode the decision logic necessary to get quotes for commercial vehicle insurance.  Each vehicle had over 500 data points and corresponding rules that determined a premium for a single vehicle.  The premiums for each vehicle then rolled into the overall policy premium.  The number of vehicles considered for a quote ranged anywhere from 10-1000 vehicles.   The hard-coded approach took close to a minute to generate a premium for a 1000 vehicle policy.  Using the InRule BRE, the same quote was generated in under 10 seconds. 
  
  In short, a BRE is extremely efficient at executing decision logic. This is what we call DYNAMIC DECISIONING!
  

Paul Hessinger, InRule Technology's CEO, presented a closing session titled "Agilty Rules: Dynamic Decisioning with BPM and BRE." As usual, Paul impressed his audience, and more than one person was heard to say it was the best session at the conference.