As I’m sure everyone has learned by now, Fair Isaac has acquired
RulesPower. I was a little unhappy about this as RulesPower was my
favorite rules engine. It was blazingly fast, it had the whole BPM
thing integrated, and the company didn’t try to sell you bundled
solutions — for verticals — that were of dubious value.
What
did this mean for RulesPower customers? A few pings to various
RulesPower and Fair Isaac people all came back with the same answer: no
more sales of the RulesPower product line and the best features of same
were to be integrated into Blaze. I’m sure lots of folks beyond myself
thought that it should be the other way around. 
Anyhow, I
was at one of those convergent SOA, BRE, BPM conferences in NYC that
seem to be springing up all over the place lately. There I talked with
a Fair Isaac tech who told me, breathlessly, that 6.1 would have the
new RulesPower RETE engine which would be up to two orders of magnitude
faster!!! Great! Of course that finally points out that Blaze was
pathetically slow before, but it’s good to see they didn’t waste any
time rolling the superior technology into their stack.
Maybe
I’ll publish my list of speediest rule engines. Not much point in going
beyond #2, since behind RulesPower/Blaze and InRule, it’s a long way
back to #3.
