Red Hat is out this week with an new release of its JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) providing users new tools for business automation.
The JBoss BRMS 5.1 release is the first major update to Red Hat’s business rules platforms since the 5.0 release in May of 2009. Among the new enhancements in the 5.1 release is a tech preview of an open source Complex Event Processing (CEP) capability that will provide new business insights to users.[login]
“Complex Event Processing enables the business rules management system to search for business event patterns,” Pierre Fricke, director product line management at Red Hat told InternetNews.com.
Fricke added that CEP looks for patterns within a certain time window or across a set of events, looking for patterns that a business may want to make an active decision on, as the events occur. One example of how CEP can be is used is for fraud detection systems. Fricke noted that for example, if a credit card is used in one city one minute and then used in another city halfway around the world in the next, that’s an event pattern that a CEP system would detect. Additionally CEP can be used for real time financial services trading platforms and even for optimization of route selection for transportation logistics.
The CEP capabilities in the BRMS 5.1 are rooted in an open source project that Red Hat has helped to lead called, Drools Fusion.
“There is a notion of consolidating business rules management and CEP and we’re on the forefront of that,” Fricke said. “These things are converging.”
The CEP capabilities inside of BRMS 5.1 are considered to be a tech preview. According to Fricke, what BRMS 5.1 is currently delivering isn’t all that different from the core Drools Fusion open source project at this point. Moving forward as CEP inside of BRMS continues to mature, Fricke expects that there will be additional console capabilities and integration.
“When we get to the full product in a future release, CEP will be more easily consumed than what is currently found in the Drools community,” Fricke said.
In addition to CEP, BRMS 5.1 includes the new ModeShape repository which is the first time Red Hat is including the open source technology.
“ModeShape is our unifying repository, it can handle lots of different artifacts and versions and sets up the ability to enable the governance of rules,” Fricke said. “You’ll see this repository manifest itself in other platforms in the future, like SOA to deal with web service artifacts.”
ModeShape has its roots in technology acquired from Metamatrix back in 2007.
