Red Hat Intros Next-Gen Business Decision Automation Platform

Red Hat introduced on Wednesday a major upgrade extending its business rules management system into a comprehensive platform for building and deploying cloud-native decision-making applications.

The release rebrands JBoss BRMS as Red Hat Decision Manager 7—a name change reflecting a shift in the enterprise market from implementing rules to making decisions, said Phil Simpson, Red Hat's JBoss product marketing manager.

Red Hat is positioning Decision Manager as a tool for business leaders looking to have control over the process of automating operational decisions, Simpson told CRN.

[Related: Red Hat Bought Middleware Developer JBoss In 2006 For $350 Million]

"This is much more focused on enabling less-technical business people to encode the rules and logic and directly generate a modern cloud-native application that automates the decision-making process," Simpson said.

"It's intended to make it easy to describe business rules that define how operational decisions are made."

Decision Manager, which implements applications as micro-services, has been integrated with Red Hat's OpenShift platform, allowing decision-making applications to be deployed inside Docker containers.

Operational decisions are those that come up frequently during the normal course of business. For an insurer, as an example, they could encompass everything from creating a price quote to selecting a coverage plan to approving a claim. They can be used internally or pushed out to face customers.

Decision Manager enables multiple means of representing rules, from spreadsheet-style decision tables to executing files using the new DMN (Decision Model and Notation) standard.

"This gives an organization the ability to codify the rules in one place that can be understood by everybody, and also to automate those decisions and offload," Simpson said.

Red Hat partners can leverage the technology in a number of ways, from reselling the platform to embedding the technology into their custom solutions to managing the decision-making applications they build for customers.

Joe Dickman, senior vice president of Vizuri, a Red Hat consultancy based in Virginia, said the rebranded product positions the former JBoss BRMS to compete in today's marketplace.

Vizuri has been pushing the use of micro-services for implementing business rules for a long time, he said, and closer integration with the OpenShift platform is driving greater adoption.

The evolving technology is an important component of knowledge management processes, he said, which are "at the heart" of larger digital transformation projects.

"Reducing decisions down to discrete services that can be maintained individually by end-users creates opportunities for changing quickly and often with confidence," Dickman told CRN.