Corticon 4 Eases Management of Business Rules Across the Enterprise; Brings Enterprise Rules Modeling, Automation and Reuse to a New Level.

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Corticon(R) Technologies, a Gartner 2005 Magic Quadrant Leader for Business Rules Engines, today announced the availability of a major upgrade to its namesake Business Rules Management System (BRMS) suite. Corticon 4 extends Corticon's business rules architecture to more effectively manage rules and policies across distributed teams and connect the rules tier with diverse data sources and applications. Corticon's new Enterprise Data Connector provides enterprise class connectivity to back-end data sources during rules execution. The new Corticon Business Rules Collaborator provides a shared repository to ease deployment, management, integration and ongoing rules modeling and development for team-based projects.

"Customers expect business rules to be independent logic that can be maintained, if not created, by business analysts as well as by programmers. This straightforward idea is, in fact, difficult to put into practice. Innovators such as Corticon are reinventing rules technology to create platforms for business-process automation," noted Forrester Research VP John Rymer in a report*.

The Corticon Enterprise Data Connector provides a direct connection from the rules engine to relational databases and other data sources. This allows the rules engine to automatically retrieve missing data or update data sources directly during rules processing, improving performance and simplifying integration. Corticon Enterprise Data Connector springs from the suite's code-free modeling approach. Unlike competing solutions, it requires no SQL programming skills; all SQL code is generated automatically from the simple, spreadsheet-like rules model. By separating rules authoring from data access, the Corticon Enterprise Data Connector eliminates delays in rules creation or maintenance and the need to rewrite rules when data sources change. This lowers the cost of ownership by reducing time-to-change as well as the skills required to create and maintain business rules.

The Corticon Business Rules Collaborator manages the business rules built in Corticon's Business Rules Modeling Studio. It helps organizations to control their rule assets with robust, multi-user management capabilities. Corticon Rules Collaborator includes enterprise team-management features such as check-in and check-out, versioning, security and access control, workflow, and collaborative rules development. Corticon Collaborator also makes it possible to gauge the impact of organizational changes on rules. For example, it can help find all of the business rules that are affected by the change of a data element or an associated business policy.

"Since the release of our first business rules solution in 2001, Corticon has provided the easiest way to model and automate business rules," said Mark Allen, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Corticon Technologies. "Now, with Corticon 4, we have again differentiated features that our large enterprise customers demand, such as data connectivity and a shared repository, through our model-driven approach. By working with Corticon, clients can have both ease-of-use and robust enterprise features in one common business rules management system."

Corticon 4 Details

Additional Corticon 4 features include:

--Improved versioning of deployed rules: The ability to have multiple versions of a decision service in production, effective across different versions of a process or different effective dates.

--Corticon's desktop modeling environment can test rules deployed remotely across intranets and the Internet, as well as rules that access back-end data sources.

--Additional rule language constructs enable the easier construction of scoring rules (increment and decrement rules), and other complex derivation-type rules.

--Powerful inferencing capabilities help perform a broader range of optimization and best-fit problems.

About Corticon Technologies, Inc.

Corticon's Business Rules Management System (BRMS) helps organizations eliminate their policy-execution gap; the gap between what executives want to happen ("policy") and what actually occurs ("execution"). Many of the world's most successful organizations rely on Corticon-powered solutions to eliminate operational risk, reduce operational cost, and improve operational agility. Corticon's patent-pending BRMS delivers the industry's only business rules modeling, analysis and automation that can ensure the consistent, efficient and reliable execution of a company's business rules and policies. Unlike competitive products that require skilled programmers, Corticon BRMS is as easy to use as a spreadsheet, thus empowering business users and lowering total cost of ownership. Corticon can be reached at www.corticon.com or at [phone]. Corticon is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif.

* 2003 Market Overview: Rules Platforms - Standing at the Threshold of Mainstream IT, Forrester Research, Inc., December 2003.