The company said that users of Blaze Advisor’s .NET and Cobol software will also be able to tap into the Rete III high-performance rules execution engine, which up to now has only been available on the Java version.
Rete is an efficient pattern-matching algorithm initially designed for implementing rule-based expert systems. Rete’s author Charles Forgy then founded RulesPower Inc in 2002 to realize commercial benefits from his research and subsequent releases followed. The company and its Rete assets were snapped up by Fair Isaac last year and incorporated into Blaze Advisor.
We’ve made the Rete III algorithm faster for our Blaze Advisor Java version and have now balanced that out on our .NET and Cobol platforms, said James Taylor, vice president of marketing at Fair Isaac.
The sequential execution and performance of rules is now the same across all of Blaze’s supported environments.
Taylor said Blaze Advisor also supports the new .NET 2.0 framework that provides a web services-like infrastructure for developing applications, and connecting information, people, systems and computing devices.
Fair Isaac first rolled out .NET support for Blaze Advisor in the summer of 2005, initially on its 5.0 platform. But it waited to include RulesPower’s Rete technology in its 6.0 platform release.
While Fair Isaac hasn’t publicized the Rete support for Cobol as much, it is nevertheless an important enhancement Taylor said.
We’ve updated our Cobol platform to support Rete III and included things like better handling of the object model and making more of the syntax identical to other environments.
He said the new functionality will help to position Blaze Advisor as the rule execution platform of choice for Fair Isaac’s big Cobol products, such as its mainframe-based Triad customer account management system.
Fair Isaac is particularly excited about the .NET release because it provides a way for companies to modernize older, legacy applications and deploy new services on newer .NET environments without necessarily having to throw everything away and start from scratch.
Our rules engine can breathe life into legacy application that companies think they have to replace because of the cost to maintain them. It’s usually only one part of it that’s high maintenance.
He cites the example of California Department of Motor Vehicles’ (DMV) vehicle licensing system as an example.
It was an old system that the DMV determined it needed to replace. In fact the application’s process hadn’t changed, only the rules needed to calculate the vehicle license.
Taylor said that financial services firms, like banks and insurance firms, would benefit from the new .NET release to help them update their decentralized marketing channels – such as the branch, storefront advisor, call center, Internet, IVR and mobile banking.
These are typically modern .NET deployments that source rules logic from legacy systems.
Fair Isaac has made a big song and dance about its ability to offer cross-platform rules management support for .NET, Java and Cobol environments, which effectively let developers use the same rules language and modeling tools to generate applications for Java, .NET, and mainframe.
We don’t see many companies in the financial services sector trying to standardize all their development on one environment anytime soon. The real value of business rules is defining them once, having them in one place and being able to deploy the same rules across client-server systems.
Separately Fair Isaac announced a new alliance with European card payment and processing firm SiNSYS to develop account management and credit card fraud detection systems using Fair Isaac’s Triad 8 and Falcon Fraud Manager technologies across seven European countries.
Established in 2003 by three of the main European inter-banking companies (Banksys, Interpay and SSB), Belgium-based SiNSYS has signed long-term contracts with two major European banking groups KBC and ING Card which has resulted in more than 23m cards and 1bn transactions contracted to date.
Both announcements were made at Fair Isaac’s annual InterACT user conference, held in San Francisco.
