Definitive Report on Decision Management Systems Platforms coming in 2012

2011 has been a great year for market awareness of Decision Management as an approach and of the value of Decision Management Systems.

2011 has been a great year for market awareness of Decision Management as an approach and of the value of Decision Management Systems. Product, partnership, acquisition and funding announcements have enhanced the available technology. As vendors continue to improve and enhance their product offerings to fully support Decision Management this is only going to reinforce and further grow the market.

There is a wide range of technology available for building Decision Management Systems. Business Rules Management Systems, Predictive Analytic Workbenches and Optimization technologies can be used alone or in combination to build custom Decision Services. In-database analytics and other analytic infrastructure can be used to maximize the effectiveness of predictive analytics.

At Decision Management Solutions we believe that the market is ready for a definitive report on platform technologies suitable for building decision management systems. The report will present the business case for Decision Management Systems and describe the technology stack for Decision Management Systems. The context for Decision Management Systems in terms of visualization/BI, performance management and a general SOA/BPM environment will be discussed but these product categories will not be evaluated.

In each Decision Management Systems platform product category, products will be reviewed and key elements for successful Decision Management Systems (such as for business user analytic modeling, in-context rule management, decision simulation etc) identified and highlighted with “badges”. Customer case studies and use cases will be used throughout. An index of vendors and product categories will be provided. The list of vendors identified to date are listed below (if you have suggestions for additional vendors, please drop me a line at info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com).

The report will be available free to download as a white paper and as a web page at decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology where we currently have links to our existing First Look product reviews.

Obviously one of the challenges with a report like this is deciding who to include. With that in mind we have identified a few criteria:

While there are many innovative companies developing complete solutions – pre-configured Decision Management Systems – we will be focusing in this report on tools for building custom systems. To be included it must be possible to build a custom Decision Management System with the product.
The technologies must be productized, released, for sale, and must have at least one production customer who can be contacted.
The product should be sold generally, not only to companies that have also bought a pre-configured application – it must have customers and a market presence as a genuine platform technology.
The business rules, analytic or optimization technology involved cannot only be an OEMed product that is included separately in the report.

There is no fee for vendors to participate and everyone will be covered, sponsor or not.

We have begun work on this report and will be releasing it over the first two quarters of 2012. The first installment of this report will include the business case for Decision Management Systems, the overall technology architecture and a list of product categories and vendors. Over the following months we will publish First Looks on all the technologies involved and several updates to the report: