Comments on: Odd quotes: “TIBCO doesn’t have a rule engine”

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:56:29 +0000

Hi Jazon: use cases for CEP / TIBCO BusinessEvents in this scenario might be:
- monitoring the processes and services (see also the AM Service Performance Manager, effectively a BE application doing this for service control in AM)
- finding complex events that drive the BPM / use services (such as identifying fraud or exception cases)
- high performance routing and gateways (see also Active Service Gateway based on BE to route to AM services and thence BPM processes) for scenarios that may be too complex for BW
Cheers

By: Jazon Samillano

Jazon Samillano — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:16:13 +0000

Hi Paul,

If you’re already using TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks and iProcess, along with the iProcess Decisions/Insight, and you really do not have a business need for Complex Event Processing, would it still make sense to add BusinessEvents into the mix to help with the business rules, or would it be wholly gratuitous?

Thanks, Paul.

Jazon

By: Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:34:29 +0000

Hi John:

- TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager is a fat-client application that allows decision tables to be defined, tested, and approved by business analysts (with an option of useing MS Excel for maintenance). Decision processing for events is a part of event processing which is why it is bundled within BusinessEvents.

- Decision Management workflows are controlled by the Rule Management Server - where workflows for decision table lifecycles (eg test, approval etc) are controlled. These workflows are themselves customizable BusinessEvents projects - indeed you could do rule management for your rule management process!

- TIBCO BusinessEvents also supports inference rules as well as queries, class models and state models, but these are not modelled at the business level (… yet) and are edited in the BusinessEvents IDE, not in the Decision Manager UI.

- TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager is not related in any way to TIBCO iProcess Decisions (which as you state is OEM’d from another rule vendor). But iPD is restricted only to iProcess projects, whereas Decision Manager is embedded in the BusinessEvents event processing engine and accessible, via TIBCO BusinessWorks, from almost any type of application. For example, TIBCO ActiveMatrix applications requiring a managed decisioning capability can embed BusinessEvents decision engines in their SOA infrastructure. Note though that DM and iPD are not related and have different table formats, albeit both XML based…

- There is no current decision table standard (although TIBCO have contributed to the production rule standards OMG PRR and W3C RIF); however we are trying to start up a standard for such decision models at OMG, called DMN.

Further reading:
cep-vs-decisions-and-rules
standards-news-prr-and-dmn-updates

Cheers

By: John S

John S — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:58:42 +0000

So you now have now your own decision management and rule engine? What happens to the Staffware suite and Rule Studio (OEM’d from Corticon)?
Are rules sharable between rules management tools? Tibco (via Corticon) allows to author only rules in a table format, what about the new Tibco rule engine? Do you provide several metaphors to author rules? Tools to manage rule change lifecycle and governance?