Stephen Hendrick is talking on the same topic as yesterday’s vendor panel which he was leading.

Why he thinks that BRMS is at a crossroad (he wont detail all topics):

• Visibility
• Passive BRE role in most cases
• Rule enforcement
• Limited scope
• Open source
• Continued relevance to changing user needs

The market for BRMS in 2008 for product revenue (excluding services) is about 285 million $ and had a growth of 10.5%. BRMS Related technologies is a market of 21845 million $ with 8.2% growth. All software market is 283082 million $ with a growth of 7.0% growth.

He then displayed an interesting chart that presented the vendors on a graph of revenue versus growth. Some forecasts that they are making on the market. He basically doesn’t see any inhibitors to growth and mentioned some growth drivers (market momentum, business awareness, IT spending, Governance, Risk and Compliance).

The forecast is for growth (even in most pessimistic case).

• Pessimistic: 2% in 2009 to about 7% in 2013
• Optimistic: 8% in 2009 to about 15% in 2013

He thinks that it will be closer to the optimistic growth in reality based on the signs he has seen recently.

For visibility, before 2008 (purchase of Rule Engines by large ISVs) visibility wasn’t so great, but that is changing. He actually thinks that IBM is in a very good position and so is FICO (although not as good as IBM),. This will drive better visibility for the industry. He also mentions BPMS putting Tibco in the lead because they are well position to execute.

Will open source have an impact? Red Hat and other players may make a difference because Open Source Software is having an impact, the BRMS market is at “risk”. Decision Services and Decision tables can easily be “commoditized”. The authoring tools is where there is a key differentiator.

He then took time to relate Rules and Analytics because rules can be data driven and the analytics (scorecarding, segmentation, data mining) can help in preparing data. Then you can use analytics to refine decisions with transformations, predictive analytics and optimization.

He also linked Rules and CEP because they share some features (active and always on, immediate response, pattern matching, decision centric and data driven). They also complement each other with temporal versus current state approaches.

He used a set of well built slides to present these concepts and their relationships.

He thinks that all of this is going towards a Decision Management Platform (DMP)which combines Events, Process, Rules, CEP, Analytics, etc. He covered some the benefits and challenges for this model.

The cloud is coming. We will see decisions services move to the cloud although some concerns still need to be addressed such as security.

The next 5 years from a vendor standpoint

• Analytics are coming as a complementary offering
• DMP is coming by combining CEP, BPM BRMS analytics and EDA
• Open sources will gain traction
• Cloud will cater to the more unpredictable performance nuances of DMP
• (missed last bullet)

The next 5 years from the user standpoint:

• Analytics
  • Proven to add value to BRMS
  • Hire the right people
• Decision Management Platforms
  • Monitor major announcements in BRMS, CEP, BPM and Analytics markets