One of my readers asked a question on one of my posts “Some BPM Tools” as to how a Business Rules Management System fits into a SOA framework and how BPM, BRMS and SOA all fit together.
Most BPM vendors do offer a Rules Management solution with their offerings. However, I feel that they are all half-full in terms of functionality. Appian, Pega, IBM and the others have all rules management offerings that probably fits the needs of almost 80% of the customers out there. However, there are certain customers in certain industries (the remaining 20%), where applications are heavily business rules centric (Eg: Healthcare, Financial etc). For these customers there are niche vendors like ILOG, which has a huge customer base for their offerings.
So, if you are looking to implement a BRMS (Business Rules Management System), but also need to make sure that fits into a BPM/SOA framework, make sure if your needs will be fullfilled by the BPM vendor that you are evaluating and if not, then you should consider vendors like ILOG for BRMS.
Recently I worked with a Healthcare customer, who uses ILOG for BRMS and WebSphere Process Server for BPM and SOA framework. The two products have worked out very well for them.
Cheers,
Steve