Pathfinder CTO Dietrich Kappe presents “Beyond the Magic Quadrant: How to Evaluate and Select the Perfect BRE for Your Project” at the 9th International Business Rules Forum

Chicago, IL (November 1, 2006) You’ve been asked to select a BRE for your company. You have Gartner’s magic quadrant, a pile of brochures, and your head is spinning from demos. Which BRE do you pick? What’s important? This presentation consolidates the experiences and lessons from BRE selections in industries including healthcare, insurance and media. It gives a no-nonsense explanation of how you might use a BRE and investigates criteria that should be a part of any selection process, such as the ability to scale as the number of rules and facts increases. Finally, a practical evaluation approach and an example test scenario will be presented. What you will learn:

• Patterns for use: what is a BRE and how exactly do you integrate it into your enterprise?
• The four criteria that absolutely must be part of your evaluation process
• A hands-on approach to evaluating BRE’s
• How to build an evaluation scenario that is representative of your business but doesn’t reveal trade secrets to the vendor
• Beyond the Engine: are IDE’s, Rule Repositories, and Pseudo Natural Language Rules useful, bell and whistles, or switching costs designed to tie you into a particular vendor?

Business Rules Forum Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington DC November 5-9 2006