Haley Ports Business Rules Engine to i5/OS

Corrected: December 9, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Haley Systems, a developer of business rules management systems (BRMS) for organizations in the financial services, healthcare, government, and manufacturing industries, recently ported its flagship BRMS server to run under the System i's native operating system, i5/OS. With HaleyRules 5.4, i5/OS shops gain a way to offload much of the business logic from legacy systems, and move this decision-making capability to a separate rules engine designed to be more flexible and easier for business users to change.

Haley Systems is a pure-play BRMS software developer founded by Paul Haley in 1989. Hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies currently use the company's BRMS offerings to augment their core back-end systems, such as insurance claims management systems or mortgage policy origination systems, with greater flexibility and ease-of-use.

There are two main components to Haley's BRMS product line. These include the HaleyAuthority rules authoring system, which runs on Windows desktops, and the HaleyRules business rules inference engine, which runs on a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Windows, z/OS, and, now, i5/OS.

According to Dan Crnarich, vice president of marketing for the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, company, Haley's software excels at making the "go, no go" decisions based on a complex set of facts and criteria that dictate whether a company makes a profit on a transaction--or takes a bath.

For example, consider a typical mortgage lender that runs an RPG- or Cobol-based loan origination program on an AS/400, iSeries, or System i server. When the company decides that it needs to change the rules dictating whether or not it's going to offer a loan to an individual, it would often require a programmer to go in and re-write the procedural code to reflect the desired change in business logic. This can take a lot of time, effort, and money to accomplish, and make the company less responsive to changing business conditions.

However, with Haley's BRMS, a business user or analyst can make these changes using plain old English--not C-specs, SQL, and subroutines. The natural language processing capability of Haley's BRMS is really what sets it apart.

"You can say, 'Deny this loan if an applicant is in Texas and has had a foreclosure in last three years,' and the system will understand that," Crnarich says. "So business users can actually build the logic, not just maintain or tweak it. Really the biggest complaint from customers is they don't want to bury that logic in places that make it two or three steps removed from the user."

While Haley's BRMS will often lessen the dependency on programmers and allow companies to more quickly respond to their changing business environment, it's not about eliminating programmers or back-end systems. Employees still enter data and navigate their host applications for the bulk of the work, but some of the "heavy lifting" of making critical decisions are now offloaded to Haley BRMS, which is accomplished via applications calls.

While many of Haley's customers use the software to house business logic for financial services applications, others are using it to maintain and enforce their privacy rules, which seem to change every week. Another organization is using it to control its maintenance schedule for airliners. The government and military are also users of Haley's BRMS, but Crnarich couldn't say exactly how these groups are using it.

Haley offers two primary versions of its flagship HaleyRules engine, including one written in Java and designed for Java platforms called HaleyRules-JP, and another version that runs on specific platforms, and is called HaleyRules-SP. Both versions are designed to be very lightweight--a system supporting 1,000 rules may only occupy 1MB of space, Crnarich says. "The footprint is small, but the power is big. That's what we're known for," he says. The company, which was recently rated by Forrester Research as one of the top BRMS vendor--beating out well-known companies like Fair, Issac and iLOG in some categories, but not in overall product standings, where those two vendors are still considered market leaders--is also in the early stages of rolling out a hosted version of the product, called HaleyRules-SOA.

Haley decided to port HaleyRules-SP to run as an ILE RPG application under i5/OS at the request of one of its customers, Countrywide Home Loans. Countrywide, a well-known user of IBM's midrange gear, has used Haley Systems software for a couple of years, and as it ramped up its use of the products, Countrywide decided that its BRMS needs were best served if HaleyRules ran on the same platforms as some of its core back-office applications: i5/OS.

Last week, Haley announced the general availability of HaleyRules version 5.4, which introduced support for i5/OS. Crnarich is hopeful about the new market for i5/OS-based BRMS software. "We think it's a good market to support," he says. The IBM business partner is also considering applying for ServerProven status from IBM, which will gain it additional visibility into the OS/400 and i5/OS community.

HaleyRules 5.4 is available now. The HaleyAuthority authoring tool starts at about $3,000 for a development and test environment, while the HaleyRules BRMS engine starts at about $15,000. For more information, visit www.haley.com.

This article has been corrected. Haley Systems was one of the top ranked BRMS vendors in a recent report from Forrester Research, not the top performer, as the article originally stated. IT Jungle regrets the error.