There are many vendors in the market who provide BRMS tools with a lot number of features with different pricing, standalone platforms, integrated suites and open source projects.

Ranking of the BRMS tools those are available in the market it difficult. The competition between products revolves around the relationships with vendors or price competition according to the Forrester Analyst John Rymer. There are many factors on which a tool can be selected out of many factors. Some of them are cost, Platform support( Java/.net/cobol/etc), less dependence on IT department/Development, analytics and more complex event processing and many. Depending on the different requirements a tool will be selected.

Hence it is difficult to say that some tools are best and others are not. Here in this article, I have collected different BRMS tools from different vendors that serve the purpose according to their needs. I have categorized all the BRMS tools into three categories.

The majority of the BRMS tools are java based, hence I categorized first one as Rich .Net Choice, second as Strongest Standalone Products and third as Open Source Tools.

Rich .Net Choice

As the majority of the BRMS tools available in the market are based on Java, .Net projects have a limited support. InRule BRMS tool provides exclusive support for the .NET background. Some of its products are

  • InRule for Javascript
  • InRule for Microsoft Azure(Cloud)
  • InRule for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Strongest Standalone Products

The tools categorized in this category have the strong set of features and the well-built components that support more business by minimizing IT maintenance costs.

  • IBM’s BRMS, Operations Decision Manager (ODM) which is previously called as Ilog JRules has a very rich feature set and relatively high price tag. IBM ODM suits more for those who look for analytics and complex event processing.
  • FICO’s BRMS, Blaze Advisor also has the rich set of features with some decent pricing. As per some news, I gathered, some financial firms always favor FICO Blaze Advisor it seems.
  • Progress’s BRMS, Corticon have some well-built components at lower pricing than the ODM and Blaze.
  • Recent days, there is a new tool introduced by Sparkling Logic called as the SMARTS Decision Manager and PENCIL Decision Modeler. One of the interesting aspect of these tools is that Charles Forgy, inventor of RETE Algorithm is the main Advisor for SMARTS. Forgy developed a new generation of the RETE Algorithm called RETE-NT, which was claimed that it is 500 times faster than the original RETE Algorithm and 10 times faster than its predecessor RETE II. RETE-NT is the inference engine of the SMARTS product.

Open Source Tools

Open source rule engines and rule management suites tend to be more developer focussed. Once the framework/architecture is built, these open source rule engines serve the purpose. But they lack in the advanced features provided by IBM, FICO, Progress, etc.

  • Red hat’s JBOSS is the commercial distribution of the open-source BRMS tool DROOLS.
  • OpenRules which is more simple and provides users to keep their Business rules in google docs or excel spreadsheets. This will be suitable for small business applications effectively.
  • JESS 7, is another open source rule engine which is suitable for the small scale business applications.

These are the different BRMS tools available from different vendors in the current market. Happy Learning! Happy Exploring!!