ILOG Jrules: Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems ILOG Jrules: Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems White Paper

White Paper

ILOG JRules: Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems ILOG JRules: Leading the Way in Business Rule Management Systems White Paper

© ILOG, March 2005 – Do not duplicate without permission. ILOG, CPLEX and their respective logotypes are registered trademarks. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. The material presented in this document is summary in nature, subject to change, not contractual and intended for general information only and does not constitute a representation. ILOG Business Rules ILOG JRules

Contents

Audience ...... 4 Applicable ILOG JRules Versions...... 4 Introduction...... 5 The Five Strengths ...... 5 Strength 1: Comprehensive Feature Set...... 6 Tools...... 6 Rule Languages ...... 7 Repository ...... 8 BRE Server...... 8 Rule Engine...... 9 Strength 2: Reliability ...... 10 Rule execution speed...... 10 A Scalable BRMS ...... 11 Dedication to standards ...... 11 Strength 3: Customizability and Extensibility ...... 13 Customization services...... 13 Extension services ...... 13 Strength 4: Track Record...... 14 Stability of ILOG ...... 14 “Blue Chip” references ...... 14 Growing customer base...... 14 Strength 5: Complete Offering ...... 15 Conclusion ...... 15 Additional Resources ...... 15

Audience This document is intended for those who wish to learn more about business rule management and business rule management systems, and to understand why JRules is the leading BRMS available.

Applicable ILOG JRules Versions This document covers ILOG JRules 5.0.x

Introduction

ILOG has worked for many years to make ILOG JRules the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS). JRules makes business rule management practical by providing innovative tools to author, deploy and manage business rules across the enterprise. This is why it has become an essential part of the IT infrastructures of hundreds of businesses worldwide, and the list of customers continues to grow with each passing quarter.

ILOG JRules’ reputation has resulted in the BRMS’s inclusion in the SD Times 100 and the Crossroads A-List. It has received the Intelligent Enterprise Editor’s Choice Award and Software Development magazine’s Productivity Award, among other top industry honors.

Major IT research firms recognize ILOG JRules as a market leader. Gartner has listed it in the Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines in every version of the Magic Quadrant, and Giga, Butler Group and Bloor Research all recommend ILOG JRules specifically for business rule management. IDC identifies ILOG as the overall leader in market share for the BRMS market.

Why does ILOG JRules hold this commanding position among business rule management systems? Put simply, ILOG JRules has strengths that – taken together – are unsurpassed in the marketplace.

The Five Strengths

ILOG JRules’ strengths begin with its comprehensive feature set. ILOG JRules provides tools and rule languages that help policy managers, business analysts and developers author, deploy and manage business rules. It also includes a repository to store and protect business rules, a powerful rule engine to execute rules, and an extensive Java library to define and extend rule execution and management environments.

Another major strength is ILOG JRules reliability. The combination of high performance and robustness make the product’s rule engine the one to depend on with mission-critical business applications, regardless of the throughput requirements. All the components in ILOG JRules are based on the latest standards for J2EE, XML, Web services and even rule engines (e.g., JSR94). It is designed to fit into a modern computing environment seamlessly and efficiently, so there is no need for a custom or proprietary interface or adapter.

ILOG JRules is customizable and extensible to an unprecedented degree. Practically every feature provided “out of the box” can be customized. The tools, repository and engine are all supported with rich APIs, and frameworks that enable their extension programmatically.

ILOG JRules has achieved an impressive track record over the last several years. A contributing factor is the stability of its maker -- ILOG --both from a financial and an organizational standpoint. There are also its blue-chip references. ILOG JRules is employed across the enterprise at leading companies around the world in finance, government, telecommunications, insurance, e-businesses and manufacturing. And this list is growing fast.

ILOG JRules’ fifth major strength is its complete offering. ILOG JRules is not just software and documentation, although the software is award winning, and its documentation comprehensive and educational. ILOG provides maintenance services and technical support, classroom and onsite training, solution frameworks and product consulting. ILOG provides all the software and services needed to successfully apply business rule management.

Strength 1: Comprehensive Feature Set

ILOG JRules provides tools and rule languages that help policy managers, business analysts and developers author, deploy, and manage business rules. It also includes a repository to store and protect business rules; a powerful rule engine to execute rules; and an extensive Java library to define and extend the rule execution and management environments. Each of these major component areas is rich with features.

Tools

Feature Description Orchestrate the execution of rule packages Ruleflow using UML Author and maintain rules as decision Decision Table Editor tables Decision Table Designer Make templates for decision tables Author and maintain rules as decision Decision Tree Editor trees Decision Tree Designer Make templates for decision trees Graphical Business Object Model Diagram objects manipulated by rules Editor using UML

Consistency Checking Identify broken or redundant rules Rule Validation Automatically check rule syntax Search for and update anything in the Query repository Work with only the tools you need; hide Plug-In Architecture the ones you don’t need Browse and select rules, templates, queries, Repository Explorer decision tables, Ruleflow and more Browse and select objects manipulated by Business Object Model Explorer rules Template Designer Create rule templates Author, read and update template-based Template Editor rules Author, read and update rules on your Syntactic Rule Editor desktop Author, read and update rules through a Web Rule Editor Web browser Property Sheet View and edit rule properties Evaluate the runtime performance of a rule Profiler set Debug rules, decision tables and Ruleflow Debugger as they are executed by the rule engine Tracer Monitor execution events as they occur

Rule Languages

Feature Description Author rules using natural language Business Action Language (BAL) syntax Author rules using Java- or XML-like ILOG Rule Language (IRL) syntax Business Rule Language Definition Customize the provided rule languages or Framework create your own Java Language Integration Use Java expressions directly in the IRL Include time-based conditions and actions Temporal Expressions in rules Author rules in English, French, Japanese Internationalization and other languages

Repository

Feature Description Assign versions to rules and decision Rule Versioning tables Permission Management Control access to rules and tools View the history of changes made to rules Rule History and rule properties Store rules, rule properties, decision tables, Ruleflow, templates and more in files or Persistence database management systems Automatically coordinate multiuser collaboration on rule authoring and Locking management Use third-party SCC tools to store and SCC Integration retrieve repository artifacts

BRE Server

Feature Description J2EE Components Integrated suite of components for executing business rules on production J2EE application servers and databases. Management Web-based system administration console and Java Management Beans. Integration with Java Management Bean tools such as IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView. Builder Integration Hot-deployment and packaging of business rules from JRules Builder. AS Integration Powerful integration with the underlying J2EE Application Server for cache management and configuration. Remote Debugging Interactive, remote debugging of rulesets deployed to the BRES from Rule Builder JIT code generation Safe Just-In-Time generation of Java bytecode from rulesets Ruleset Persistence RDBMS used to persist rulesets in

production Automation Tools Suite of automation tools for developers and system administrators to perform all major management tasks through scripts or application build files

Rule Engine

Feature Description Apply sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms to arbitrarily execute complex Inferencing Execution Mode rule sets Maximize execution speed for simple rule Sequential Execution Mode sets XML Binding Read and write XML files directly Invoke external Web services directly from Web Service Binding rules Database Binding Connection to DBMS facilitated Manage performance using pools of rule Context Pooling engines Call the JRule engine by using the JSR94 Support for JSR94 standard rule engine interface Update rule sets “on the fly” without Ruleset Update Management restarting Boost performance by automatically JIT Bytecode Generation translating rule sets into Java bytecode Enable remote connection of debugging Remote Debugging tool for embedded application diagnosis Automatically resolve rule conflicts during execution by using refraction, priority and Conflict Resolution version Multithreaded Architecture Share objects across multiple threads Use logical objects to automatically assert Truth Maintenance System and retract conditional hypotheses Incorporate time as a parameter during Temporal Reasoning rule execution Execute Ruleflow and rules in the same Support for Ruleflow engine

Strength 2: Reliability

Another primary reason why ILOG customers select ILOG JRules over other BRMSs is its reliability. The three aspects of reliability most cited are rule execution speed, rule engine robustness, and a dedication to industry standards apparent throughout the software.

Rule execution speed

In a recent lab test, ILOG personnel measured the execution speed of the ILOG JRules rule engine. The rule set for the test consisted of 1,500 rules. Each rule used five conditions to assign one of five actions to a sales item, based on the characteristics of the item. A total of 10,000 sales items were included in the test.

Three execution modes were run in the test: inferencing, inferencing with bytecode generation, and sequential. Rule execution by inferencing used the highly advanced RETE algorithm to efficiently match rule conditions to the sales items. During inferencing, all the rules were reactive to data change and became applicable when the conditions were verified. A rule selection strategy was used to select the rules to execute.

Inferencing with bytecode generation added a just-in-time optimization step that translated test evaluations into efficient Java bytecode before execution. (Bytecode generation is an optional enhancement for the inferencing mode.)

Sequential execution applied a brute-force approach to the rule evaluation. In this mode, rules were evaluated and executed in a predefined order, and the rule selection strategy was discarded.

Usually, the characteristics of a rule set make it executable with either inferencing or sequential mode, but not both. In this case, the test rule set was designed so that both inferencing and sequential execution modes could be applied and compared.

Execution Mode Execution Speed (rules per second) Inferencing 22.7K Inferencing w/ bytecode generation 68.6K Sequential 384K K = Thousand (Tests conducted on a Sun Blade 1000 running Solaris 8 with 1.5 GBytes of memory)

Running the test produced an execution speed of 22,700 rules per second for pure inferencing. Adding bytecode generation produced a 3X increase to 68,600 rules per

second. Switching to sequential mode increased performance enormously, to an execution speed of 384,000 rules per second.

A Scalable BRMS

ILOG JRules is being successfully applied across business applications varying greatly in operating profile and performance requirements. This point is illustrated in the following table of examples taken from real deployments by ILOG JRules customers: Application Type Rules Operating Profile Straight Through Processing: Data 1K 2-2.5K orders/day, 2M Validation, Confirmation, Order rules/day Routing and Message Transformation Asset Management: Validation and 300 300K validations/hour Consolidation Credit Qualification 50 2.8K records/sec, 130K rules/sec Automatic Trading 30 15 rules/sec Automatic Trading 120 50 trades/sec Order Validation and Routing 60 2K orders/day Mediation 6K 10M transactions/hour Claim Assignment 450 225K claims/day Welfare Benefit Eligibility 300 >300 rules/sec Loan Acquisition and Servicing 200 5M loans/day Claim Validation and Routing 360 0.25 claims/sec, 1M claims/month Transaction Validation and Routing 8K 120K transactions/day Order Management 1.8K 20K transactions/day Content Routing 15 150K-250K messages/day Automobile Financing 100 Up to 40K requests/day Reservation Data cleansing 1.6K 16K reservations/day K = Thousand M = Million

ILOG JRules has been proven stable and reliable from proof of concept to deployment of mission-critical business applications operating in a 24x7x365 environments.

Dedication to standards

ILOG JRules conforms to the current and emerging standards of the Object Management Group (OMG), Java Community Process (JCP) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for:

• Repositories • Rule engines • XML • Web services • Web Rule Builder

Standards implemented by ILOG JRules include:

Standard Version Standard Standard type Implemented in ILOG source JRules by MOF 1.4 OMG Object model Business Object Model specification XMI 1.1 OMG XML grammar Repository file persistence JMI 1.0 JCP API Repository Model API JSR-94 1.0 JCP API Rule engine server

Standards supported by ILOG JRules include:

Standard Version Standard Standard Supported in source type ILOG JRules by JDK 1.3.1, 1.4.1, JCP API All modules 1.4.2 JDBC 2.0 JCP API Repository database persistence J2EE 1.3 JCP API Rule engine EJB deployment EJB 1.1, 2.0 JCP API Rule engine EJB deployment JAXP 1.1 JCP API All XML parsers, XSLT invocation XML 1.0 W3C XML XML binding Schema grammar WSDL 1.1 W3C XML Web service grammar binding, Rule engine deployment SOAP 1.1 W3C XML Web service

grammar binding, Rule engine deployment Servlet 2.2, 2.3 JCP API Web Rule Builder JSP 1.1, 1.2 JCP API Web Rule Builder CSS 2 W3C Grammar Web Rule Builder look and feel

Strength 3: Customizability and Extensibility

ILOG JRules provides mechanisms for customizing and extending all its components, including its tools, languages, repository and engine. The customization services make it easy to adjust the performance, functionality and appearance of components provided with ILOG JRules, while the extension services make it possible to add capabilities that are not provided by default with ILOG JRules.

Customization services

ILOG JRules can be customized in several ways:

• Installing or uninstalling tools using a plug-in architecture • Changing configuration properties • Customizing the look and feel of ILOG JRules Web components via CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

Extension services

ILOG JRules can be extended in several ways:

• Adding a custom tool or function using the plug-in architecture • Adding custom functionality via ILOG JRules Application Programming Interface • Adding a custom business rule language • Embedding ILOG JRules Web components in custom user interfaces • Embedding ILOG JRules Java Beans in custom Java applications

Strength 4: Track Record

Stability of ILOG

For more than 10 years, ILOGʹs innovative enterprise-class software components and services have helped companies maximize their business agility and improve operating efficiency. Over 1,000 global corporations and more than 300 leading software vendors rely on ILOGʹs business rule, optimization and visualization technologies to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG has had the same chief executive since the company’s inception, and its employee turnover rate is well below the industry average. For R&D in particular, it is well below 5 percent.

“Blue Chip” references

Here are what CIOs of major companies have to say about ILOG JRules:

“We selected ILOG JRules because of its rich user interface, and its business approach that puts the power of the customization in the user’s hands. The performance and scalability of ILOG JRules were other key reasons.” – Liz Shuttleworth, CIO, Radian Guaranty

“Sometimes I walk out of my office and see a group of customers actively playing at a time that used to be slow. And I say to myself, they wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for the one-off promotions I can do with our rules system.” – Tim Stanley, CIO, Harrah’s Entertainment

“Using ILOG JRules, we will have a solution that will scale as our business requirements change while supporting CitiStreetʹs need to exchange and manage employee information in real time.” - Andy Marsh, CIO, Total Benefits Outsourcing, CitiStreet

Growing customer base

ILOG’s customer base for ILOG JRules has experienced double-digit growth in the last three years, with no letup in sight. It includes EBay, Freddie Mac, , Disney, Sabre and many other leading Global 2000 companies, and governments worldwide.

Strength 5: Complete Offering

ILOG JRules includes more than just award-winning software and comprehensive, instructional documentation. It is also fully backed with maintenance and support services, classroom and onsite training, and solution frameworks and consulting from our professional services. Together, they add up to a complete solution for business rule management.

Conclusion

ILOG JRules leads in the business rule management marketplace because of its strengths:

1. Comprehensive Feature Set 2. Reliability 3. Extensibility and Customizability 4. Track Record 5. Completeness of Offering

Taken together, these five strengths make ILOG JRules the right choice in BRMS.

Additional Resources

More information on ILOG JRules, including datasheets, specifications, case studies and white papers, can be obtained from an ILOG Sales Representative near you or the ILOG JRules Web pages, at www.ilog.com/products/jrules.