Steven Núñez has written a review of the latest release of ILOG Rules for .NET. Download a 6-month free trial of Rules for .NET here. You can watch a recorded demo here.
Congratulations to all the Rules for .NET team for another outstanding release!
You may have noticed that the BRMS Resource has had a makeover recently, expanding it to cover JRules, Rules for .NET and Rules for COBOL. 6 month trial versions of both JRules and Rules for .NET are now available and the content available to help you evaluate Rules for .NET has been expanded.
Don’t hesitate to send your feedback to the BRMS product managers!
An interesting press release this morning from Celent:
A new Celent report, Business Rules and Underwriting Automation at Travelers, presents a case study of how an insurance company achieved significant success in automating underwriting and pricing of several lines sold to its small business customers. The company is Travelers; the business unit is Select Accounts; the products are sold in its TravelersExpress program; and the key technologies supporting this initiative are a business rules management system (BRMS), predictive analytics, and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
It does not take much research to discover which BRMS is being used or the benefits realized! 
The new Forrester Wave report on Business Rules Platforms has been released and I’m thrilled to see ILOG has done extremely well when compared to our competitors.
The report is full of interesting information, but here is one of the nice quotes:
The report stated, “With an installed base of 984 customers and 4,542 licenses sold, ILOG has the most market penetration of any of the vendors evaluated. ILOG offers both JRules® and Rules™ for .NET® and has a strong and comprehensive road map.” Based on Forrester’s research, ILOG has more than two times the number of customers as compared to any other business rules management systems (BRMS) vendor listed in the report.
As a software developer it’s extremely gratifying to hear of real customers solving challenging problems with your software. We are far from complacent however and are very busy working on JRules 7 — which will bring even more value to existing and future customers. Stay tuned!
Simon Holloway, Senior Analyst for Bloor Research, has published the second article in his ILOG BRMS series. The article presents the different BRMS product offerings, the modules that make up the products as well as ILOG’s approach to build engaging tools for IT and business users.
At the end of the article mentions our new scorecard capability for JRules — more on that very soon!
The future runs on System z — don’t forget to pack your business rules!
We recently pushed out an add-on module to JRules: Rules for COBOL. This sweet little addition to the BRMS product family allows you to import a COBOL copybook into Rule Studio and then generate a Business Object Model. You then author rules against the BOM before generating COBOL source code to be compiled into your native COBOL application. ILOG Rules for COBOL supports IBM Enterprise COBOL 3.3.
My colleague Stuart Culshaw also blogged on the announcement from DIALOG 08.
For many, this week will be remembered thanks to another massive and high-profile failure in the application of corporate governance. So, perhaps it is appropriate that this week also marks the major release of ILOG Rules for .NET 3.0, our BRMS for Microsoft’s .NET platform.
Congratulations to Georges Schumacher and his R&D team, as well as all the contributors from across the Rules Product Division: the Java engineers from the Language and Rule Engine teams whose Java code is translated into C# for inclusion in the .NET product, the QA team for their tireless testing, Product Managers for setting the heading, and the Program and Project Managers for steering the course. Finally the documentation, samples and tutorials team for doing an outstanding job, always under tight deadlines.
This release represents another leap forward in our .NET BRMS strategy and includes major upgrades for all users of the product, from technical programmers to Business Analysts to IT support staff.
I think the official “What’s New” list speaks for itself. Yesterday I walked down the hall and was able to snag you some more screenshots of these cool new features:
Editing a BAL rule using the new IntelliRule rule editor, powered by the underlying cross-platform language and parsing technology
Editing a BAL rule within a Microsoft Word 2007 document. Combine executable business rules with free-text documentation and graphics!
Editing a Decision Table within Excel 2007.
Managing RuleDocs using Microsoft Sharepoint
The Rule Execution Server for .NET architecture should look familiar to JRules RES users; it is a very elegant mapping of the JRules concepts onto Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) architecture. The RES.NET makes integrating a .NET native rule engine into a Service Oriented Architecture a piece of cake!
RES.NET execution architecture.
RES.NET management architecture.
Managing RES.NET using the Microsoft Management Console
The depth of integration with the Microsoft ecosystem is very impressive. Check out the list below! We are very proud that no other BRMS vendor can claim this degree of integration with the Microsoft platform.
So, with all these new tools at your disposal, “Where do you want to go today?”