Dr. Feldman and Mr. Nakayama, CEO at Intra-Mart

I’ve just returned from my first ever trip to Japan. I am coming back home to the US with very bright impressions of the Japanese culture and people. I was especially impressed by the deep respect and high professionalism with which people in Japan perform their jobs independently of how small or important those jobs are. I deeply appreciate the friendliness and readiness to help from people on the streets of Tokyo and Kyoto that I have not seen for a while.

This visit was organized by our Japanese partner NTT Data Intra-Mart.
On Oct. 16 and 17 I gave 3-hour lectures to 60+ people who are Intra-Mart customers, partners and/or employees. I spoke about different Decision Management technologies in general and about real-world OpenRules experience in particular. Then on Oct. 18 I participated in their major event “Enterprise Web Solutions 2013” that attracted more than 1,000 attendees with multiple Japanese businesses presenting their software products. I was really impressed how well these events were organized.

I was warned that rule engines were not highly popular in Japan until recently. However, based on my various interactions with different practitioners I may say that there is an apparent interest in business rules and decisions management. I expect Japan will quickly become a major adapter of the latest business rules and analytics techniques.

I was also very pleased to see the growing popularity of our open source Business Decision Management System, OpenRules, among Japanese business solution providers. Our partner, Intra-Mart, managed to incorporate OpenRules in their Business Process Management product “IM-BIS”.  In particular, it allows Intra-Mart partners and customers to build their own business processes with complex decision points. Each partner/customer may define decisions and supporting rules in their own custom repositories using Excel or Google Docs. Then an intuitive graphical mapping mechanism helps them to simply map OpenRules glossaries to the already existing business concepts defined in IM-BIS. After such mapping, OpenRules-based decision services may be automatically invoked by the IM-BIS business process engine. This approach allows Intra-Mart partners to create intelligent business processes with a very flexible decision logic controlled by subject matter experts (not programmers). I consider this as a very practical and promising approach. No wonder we see more and more OpenRules downloads from Japanese websites.

During my presentations in Japan, I tried to promote the Decision Management approach
in general supported by various BR vendors and not just by OpenRules (of course, I did stress key OpenRules differentiators).  And it was really nice to learn that the leading Japanese telecom provider NTT Communications conducted a research about different business rule products and selected OpenRules as a product of choice.

I want to express my sincere appreciation to the Intra-Mart CEO Mr. Nakayama and the Director Mr. Tanaka for their hospitality and constructive discussions. We plan to deepen our cooperation to further integrate OpenRules with Intra-Mart products and to offer a consolidated decision management solution to Japanese businesses.