Increasingly business rule engines and their associated tools (business rule platforms) are being adopted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. All of these companies have complex enterprise information technology infrastructure, often maintained by hundreds of people. Automating the management and execution of business rules and business policy usually necessitates integration with existing people, processes and enterprise software systems. This presentation outlines some of the challenges and goals of deeply integrating a business rule platform within an enterprise information technology infrastructure.

1. The Business Rules Platform
and Enterprise Integration
Daniel Selman
dselman@ilog.fr
ILOG, Inc.
Internal ILOG Document 1

2. Who Are You?
• Product Manager, ILOG Business Rules
• Enterprise Integration in general
• Rule engine requirements
• J2EE requirements
• IBM zSeries requirements
• JSR-94 Specification Lead
• BEA WebLogic Portal Architect
• Lead rule engine team for web personalization
technology
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3. Agenda
• Enterprise scale challenges
• Integration (BPM)
• Enterprise BRMS
• Integration Requirements
• Subject Matter Experts
• Software Engineering Practices
• Operations Support
• Data Stores
• Conclusions
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4. Enterprise Challenges
• Integrating multiple systems
• Dealing with scale
• Vendor relationships
• Change management
• Mission critical systems
• (Many) people and processes (incl. security)
• Geography, culture, language
• Hot-backup, Cold-backup
• Staging, production process
• Politics!
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5. Moving Beyond Quick Wins...
• Deep enterprise integration
• Providing a strong platform for customers
and vendors to leverage
• Parse and JIT 100,000 rules...
• Evaluate 40,000 rules in 20 ms
• Execute millions of rules per-day
• “Bet my business technology...”
• Professional services, support, maintenance
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6. Enterprise Architecture
• Rule engines are becoming an important
component of enterprise architecture:
• Structural Logic => OR/ER models, source code
• Fixed Business Logic => BPM, work flow
• Variable Business Logic => Business Rules
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7. Moving to Mainstream
• “He who owns the compiler wins...”
• Have to ease adoption of BR technology for IT
• System Administrators are key
• Have to understand enterprise challenges
and culture
• Cannot impose solutions – have to be flexible
yet complete
• Have to integrate
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8. Microsoft BizTalk
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9. BizTalk – Business Process
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10. BizTalk - Rule Engine
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11. BizTalk – Rule Editing
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12. IBM WBI – Business Process
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13. BEA WebLogic Workshop
Demo
ILOG JRules and BEA WLI
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14. Enterprise BRMS
Application Development Business Rule Management
Testing
Developer Authoring
Business Analyst
Development Deployment Testing
Policy Manager
Analysis Deployment
Requirements
Business Rule Execution
Sys Admin
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15. Enterprise BRMS
• Enterprise BRMS supports:
• All participants in the BRM life cycle
• Large projects with large development teams
• Rule maintenance by large, distributed policy
management teams
• Rule sharing across multiple applications,
multiple platforms
• Enterprise-class integration methods
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16. Integration Requirements
• People
• Engineers, Subject Matter Experts, Policy
Managers...
• Tools
• IDE, BPM tools, monitoring, authoring, reporting...
• Processes
• Configurations, staging, deployment, testing,
requirements, auditing, security, availability...
• Data
• RDBMS, CRM, CICS, IMS, Tuxedo, XML...
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17. Subject Matter Experts
• Are not developers...!
• Policy Managers
• Easy to use (business) interface
• Appropriate language and complexity
• Collaboration features
• Flexibility in organization
• Access control
• Work flow and approval cycles
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18. Engineering
• Processes: RUP, XP, Waterfall etcetera
• Integrated Development Environment
• System is composed of code and
configuration
• Powerful version management: branches,
workspaces, differences and merging
• Debugging
• Profiling
• Deployment
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19. BR Studio Developer Edition
Demo
ILOG Business Rule Studio
Developer Edition
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20. Operations Support
• High-availability
• Capacity planning
• Monitoring and management
• Alerts
• Standard protocols: SNMP, JMX
etcetera
• Standard tools: HP OpenView,
IBM Tivoli etcetera
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21. Integration Requirements
• Data Stores
• Rule engine must process external data
• Where is it coming from?
• Typically RDBMS tables or XML files
• Often legacy data stores
• Sometimes ERP or CRM systems
• Sometimes W eb Services
• Usually results are written to a persistent store
• Transactional application
• Auditing and logging
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22. Conclusions
• 2004 is an exciting time for business rules!
• This is a hard problem: due to integration
issues not (just) technology or algorithms.
• We must do a better job at communicating
how business rules integrate with traditional
programming skills and roles.
See you at JavaOne 2004!
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23. References
• Rule Engines and J2EE: A Platform for Flexible Enterprise Applications:
• http://servlet.java.sun.com/javaone/sf2003/conf/sessions/display-1412.en.jsp
• Microsoft BizTalk:
• http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/
• IBM Business Performance Management:
• http://www-306.ibm.com/software/info/topic/perform/
• ILOG Business Rules Products
• http://www.ilog.com/products/businessrules/
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24. Questions and Discussion
?
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