The Forrester Wave™: Business Rules Platforms, Q1 2006

Business rules have gone from a technology that only a programmer could love, as well as being confined to specialist use cases, to a powerful platform that is often found coupled with SOA environments, helping to shape a new, more declarative programming model. Business rules platforms automate decisions, analysis to action, and policy compliance. This popularity is evidenced by the large volume of Forrester client inquiries on the topic and the strongly growing revenues of most business rules platform providers.

Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top business rules platform vendors. The results of their evaluation: Fair Isaac, ILOG, and Pegasystems are the leaders in general-purpose platforms for IT because of their comprehensive developer features, rules management features, and strong presence in the market.

However, specialist vendors like Corticon Technologies, Haley Systems, and Resolution EBS are the leaders in platforms for nonprogrammers and nontraditional rules development, which is just one of the new product segments that are emerging within the business rules platform market.

Forrester has included business rules technology within our definition of the application platform for several years, and the recent, more rapid growth in this market shows that this view is now playing out in the market. So just as with acquisitions in the SOA infrastructure context, expect to see further consolidation or extension of the major SOA platforms to fully embrace this concept of rules in the platform -- this year.