Building a Firm Foundation

Corticon Technologies on Wednesday announced general availability of the Corticon Business Rules Management Foundation, a software platform that embeds business rules management capabilities into any enterprise application. Called Corticon Foundation, it is the first release in the Corticon 5 product line, with all future Corticon products being built upon Foundation, according to the company. Corticon Foundation allows enterprise software developers to build decision automation capabilities directly into their own application interfaces and manage their business rules from within their repositories, says David Straus, senior vice president of marketing at Corticon. Business rules systems have historically allowed companies to separate the creation and management of critical business logic from their hard-coded applications; thereby delivering on the promise of agility and reuse. But the process of creating and managing the business rules occurred exclusively within the user interface of the business rules system. "It's like walking into a restaurant, ordering your food, and then being asked to go eat it across the street," Straus says. "With previous Corticon applications, you had to leave the application you were working within to alter rules from within Corticon. It wasn't seamless." As a result, Straus says, Corticon's customers and partners have demanded ways to integrate business rules creation and management into their native user interfaces, whether they are development environments like a business process management system or specific end-user applications like a CRM system. To accomplish this, Corticon Foundation uses an open architecture that separates their user interfaces from the set of business rules capabilities in Corticon's business rules management systems (BRMS). Foundation consists of a library of model-driven BRMS functions, delivered as a set of "headless services that can be exposed to any form, and from within any applications," Straus says. "We use business rules modeling and repository APIs so partners and customers can design patterns, giving Foundation the look and feel of their native interfaces." "One of the more complex and pressing issues in the BRMS market is the integration of a decisioning system with other applications," said Stephen Hendrick, vice president of application development and deployment research at IDC, in a written statement. "A decisioning system is a key component in the application stack and must integrate with other components/subsystems responsible for application development, messaging, business process, metadata management, business analytics, and change and configuration management. BRMS vendors that integrate in a way that complements and eliminates redundancy within key systems of records will accelerate their product's path to adoption and partnering." Related articles: The Newest Method of BPM The CRM Intersection