2019 has brought lots of innovations and positive developments for OpenRules and its customers. This post summarizes all the new capabilities and user experiences that we have introduced in 2019.

In February-2019, a new OpenRules guide “Goal-Oriented Decision Modeling with OpenRules” had been published at Amazon. It is oriented to business people who want to build their own operational decision models. As our previous guide “DMN in Action with OpenRules“, this one is also accompanied by free evaluation software. Read more about OpenRules Books.

In May-2019, we released OpenRules 7.0.1 that provided support for Decision Microservices incorporated into the popular Spring framework. The new tutorial “Developing Decision Microservices with Spring Boot and OpenRules” and the supporting demo microservice “GreetingService” is available for downloads in the new workspace “openrules.spring“.  Release 7.0.1 also simplified an access to data defined is Excel.

In July-2019, we published a new tutorial “Creating OpenRules Decision Microservices with Maven, SpringBoot, and Docker”  that shows how to “mavenize” the classic OpenRules workspace, create a SpringBoot project, and add to it OpenRules-based microservices deployed with Docker. You may download the workspace called “openrules.services” included in the evaluation version.

In August-2019, OpenRules announced an availability of the brand new product “OpenRules Decision Manager” that has  been developed specifically for modern enterprises allowing their business analysts to create, deploy, and manage Business Decision Services on cloud, on premise, or even on smartphones. It comes with a completely new execution mechanism that is extremely fast, takes almost no time to start, and essentially reduces the memory footprint. It perfectly fits the requirements of modern containerized decision microservices. At the same time we announced the availability of the new release 8.0.0 of the Classic OpenRules BRDMS that includes many new features requested by customers – see Release Notes 8.0.0. It is important that both products can efficiently execute the same Business Decision Models created using MS Excel or Google Sheets in accordance with our Goal-Oriented Decision Modeling approach.

In September-2019, we published a new Release 8.0.1 of the Decision Manager that can automatically deploys classical business decision models on-cloud as AWS Lambda functions without coding – see the tutorial “Building Operational Decision Services with OpenRues, AWS Lambda, and AWS API Gateway“. At the same time we added a user-friendly Rules Debugger.

In October-2019, we published OpenRules Decision Manager 8.0.2 that supports ONE-CLICK AWS LAMBDA DEPLOYMENT! OpenRules became the first product that allowes Business Analysts (!) without help from IT to deploy and test their business decision models created in Excel as AWS Lambda decision services and test them remotely. No coding or knowledge of the AWS environment is required.  From now on OpenRules provides a user-friendly support for cloud-based microservices.

In November-December of 2019 we received a very positive feedback from our customers: after switching to the newest OpenRules Decision Manager the same decision models show 6-10 times performance improvement! While OpenRules always was among the fastest decision execution engines, the new OpenRules Decision Manager managed to provide super-fast performance for modern enterprise decision-making applications that handle millions of rules-based transactions per day. 

In 2019 OpenRules was well-presented at these two major annual Business Rules and Decision Management events:

Thus, there were really a lot of innovations and positive developments for OpenRules and its customers in 2019, and we plan to build on these successes in 2020. We wish a very Happy New Year to all our customers and colleagues!