Red Hat Inc. is repositioning its former JBoss BRMS business rule management system as a more general decision management tool aimed at leaders looking to automate operational decisions.

The rebranded Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is described as a major upgrade of JBoss BRMS that simplifies the development and deployment of rules-based applications and services. Business rules automation software works from the existing policies and legal regulations and standard operational procedures that companies already have in place. Automating such processes not only improves operational efficiency, but these companies can then respond better to changing market conditions.

Red Hat Decision Manager takes a low-code approach to enabling business users to develop applications that improve collaboration between business and information technology stakeholders and accelerate the application development process, Red Hat said. Its scalable rules engine is based on Drools 6, an engine for modeling complex scenarios. Complex event processing extensions from the Drools Fusion project provide the ability to process time-based constraints for real-time decision making.

Red Hat cited an International Data Corp. forecast that nontraditional developers will create 30 percent of new application features by 2021. “High productivity development based on low code provides a mechanism for collaboration between business and developers that delivers value faster and improves the speed of change,” Maureen Fleming, program vice president of Integration and Process Automation at IDC, said in a prepared statement.

The new release is based upon microservices and containers, and rides atop Red Hat’s OpenShift container application platform. This enables rules to be deployed both on-premise and in the cloud using OpenShift. Highlights of the new release include support for the direct execution of models expressed in the Object Management Group’s Decision Model and Notation format, redesigned decision tables, a new decision table editor and an improved data modeler. users can also create models using spreadsheet-style decision table.

Northwell Health Inc. uses the software to speed the development of its core applications such as identifying patients for enrollment into care management programs. The healthcare provider also built rules to help stratify patients for clinical risk and identify optimal treatment options, the company said in a press release.

Red Hat Decision Manager can be downloaded from the Red Hat Developers community.

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