A Business Rules Engine (BRE) is essentially a set of software tools that allows analysts and developers to build calculation and decision logic that operates against a company's data. Its primary purpose is to separate the business logic from the system logic allowing substantial changes in system behavior without substantial changes to code. The "externalised" business rules can be deployed into mission-critical enterprise systems to affect the logic by which the system executes.

InRule is built entirely on the .NET platform, leveraging a component architecture that delivers unparalleled rule processing performance and flexibility. From the feature rich rule authoring environment to the optimised execution of the Business Rules Engine, InRule unifies the domains of managed business logic and traditional system processes.

An Unparalleled Feature Set:

• Advanced decision table support
• Desktop and web-authoring modes of irAuthor
• Dynamic interface design and rendering capabilities of irInteract
• Real-time rule evaluation analysis using irVerify
• WSE 2.0 and Smart Client support
• Variable service modes of irServer.

Tailored to Business Users - Embraced by Developers:

• InRule empowers knowledge workers to articulate even the most complex business logic in a rapid and intuitive manner.
• Once established in the application environment, InRule inherently facilitates team development and deployment of business rule applications throughout the enterprise.

Virtually every business application has some program logic that needs to change often or needs to change in ways not anticipated in the original design. This can immediately establish grounds for a business rules engine in many system environments. The time and money saved on generally error-prone change management is often used as a "rule of thumb" when justifying the cost of a rules engine. Even in cases when the collections of rules are minimal or isolated, the benefits of a rules engine can quickly compound when the true cost of maintaining the logic is evaluated. In an era of stiff regulatory penalties and corporate-wide mandates for agile systems, a business rules engine can immediately add tangible value in many different ways.

A business rules engine is integrated into your application to replace some or all of the business logic. Generally, it does not function to modify or control the data or user interface tier of the application, although InRule does provide this functionality. The portion of the application logic that the business rules engine controls varies depending on the type of application.

In some applications, such as an insurance rating program, you may decide to use the rules engine to control as much as 70% of the application logic. In other programs like an e-commerce application, you may choose to use the rules engine only to validate the check-out process.

Your application will communicate with the rules engine by specifying what set of rules you wish to execute and passing in the data necessary to make its decisions. Once the rules execute, your application can inspect the rules engine results to display them to the end user or to execute another process.