10/04/2004

Corticon Technologies, a provider of business rules management software, today introduced Corticon 3.0, a solution to ensure more efficient and reliable execution of business rules. Corticon 3.0 delivers a new set of capabilities to Corticon’s business rules product line, including the industry’s first stand-alone desktop business rules modeler, enabling business users to create business rule sets using spreadsheet-like models instead of programming code. Version 3.0 also includes enhanced Web Services support, and complete support for localization and internationalization. Corticon 3.0 offers the only patent-pending technology solution to assure the accuracy and reliability of the business rules.

With Corticon, officials said, business organizations can model and manage their business policies, guidelines and operational decisions through an interface very similar to an Excel spreadsheet. These business models can be verified for loop holes, conflicts, or other logical errors with one click of the mouse, and then tested against business cases, all without writing a line of programming code. Once verified and tested, the business rules are automatically deployed as Web Services, enabling standards-based integration to automate decision steps across corporate processes and applications.

Customer examples include Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II compliance initiatives, loan pricing and selection in banking, claims adjudication in insurance, complex service pricing in telecommunications, and supplier selection in manufacturing.

“The management and automation of business rules is a central component in a growing number of corporate technology initiatives that deal with issues like business process improvement, straight-through processing, and particularly regulatory compliance,” said Bill Chambers, principal analyst with Doculabs, an independent technology consulting firm. “As businesses attempt to gain competitive advantages by automating their processes, they need strong business rules management capabilities to ensure that they do not sacrifice corporate best practices to make faster decisions, while complying with regulations governing their business. Corticon 3.0 can help organizations model their corporate and regulatory policies, more easily verify the reliability of these policies, and effectively deploy them to existing corporate applications.”

In addition to providing the first desktop business rules modeler, Corticon said that 3.0 also offers the only technology that mathematically verifies the reliability of business rules as a part of the modeling process, through patent-pending technology known as the Predicate Logic Matrix™. As a result, Corticon-modeled rules are guaranteed to deliver their intended result, providing a logically complete and unambiguous decision for every possible outcome.

“Defining and executing business rules is just one part of building a robust and highly reliable solution. While many rules engines enable companies to capture their business procedures and policies as actionable, electronic business logic to help automate business processes, it’s just as important to provide an easy way to verify the modeled business logic for reliability and completeness,” said David Kelly, president of Upside Research, Inc., an independent analyst and consulting firm. “Knowing that your business rules will not ‘break the IT system,’ provides organizations with better, faster decision-making as well as enhanced business agility, reduced investment in IT project maintenance, and lower risk associated with business logic improvement by eliminating potential logical flaws or rule inconsistencies.”

Corticon charges that it is differentiated by its business-friendly rules modeling environment, which speeds time-to-market and time-to-change by 10x relative to traditional business rules engines and coding techniques. Corticon is also differentiated by its delivery of rules as standards-based services, which are easily integrated into new or legacy applications. As a result, Corticon says it enables organizations to streamline operational processes, ensure compliance with corporate policies and regulations, and increase agility and flexibility to adapt business processes as the marketplace changes.

For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.corticon.com.