Red Hat Decision Manager 7 Boosts BPM with Low-Code Approach

Sean Michael

Updated · Feb 23, 2018

Red Hat is perhaps best known for its Enterprise Linux platform, but it has also been a player in the business process management (BPM) space for more than a decade.

On Feb. 21, Red Hat Decision Manager 7 was officially announced as the successor to the company’s JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) product. Red Hat first released BRMS, which itself was an evolution of the JBoss Rules Engine, back in May 2009.

Red Hat is now positioning Red Hat Decision Manager 7 as a so-called “low-code” technology that enables business users to build meaningful business processes without the need for a complex programming language.

“The notion of low-code development is less about eliminating code or cutting traditional programmers out of the application development process, and more about helping business and IT users to do what they need to do quickly and efficiently, and in a complementary manner,” Mike Piech, vice president and general manager, Middleware, at Red Hat, stated. “Ultimately, what low-code tools should offer — and what we have built with Red Hat Decision Manager — is not a platform geared toward one or the other, but rather a rich and tightly integrated feature set designed to provide a better user experience regardless of whether you are a business analyst or hard-core developer.”

Among the features that Red Hat includes in its low-code business process management (BPM) platform is a new decision table editor and an improved data modeller. From a deployment perspective, Red Hat Decision Manager 7 can be used created rules-based decision and planning applications that can be built as containers. Those containers can then run on Red Hat’s Kubernetes technology, the OpenShift Container Platform.

At the core of Red Hat Decision Manager 7 are a trio of tools from the open-source Drools upstream project, including Drools Workbench (web UI for authoring and management), Drools Expert (business rules engine) and Drools Fusion (complex event processing features), as well as jBPM (process/workflow integration for rule orchestration/flow).

Benefits of BPM

Red Hat conducted a survey of its customer base to gauge attitudes about BPM. Thirty-four percent said that their companies had adopted BPM to help operational efficiency.

Of those organizations using BPM, 57 percent are using it to automated internal processes. The move to containers is also complementary to BPM users with 55 percent noting they are already using BPM alongside containers.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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