Microsoft BPM adds decision management

Some of you will no doubt have seen today's announcement of a Business Process Alliance by Microsoft (their press release is here). Fair Isaac is one of the 10 companies in this alliance (see the Fair Isaac press release here). Interestingly a couple of BPM vendors are also in the 10, including one of Fair Isaac's partners (Metastorm).

Personally I think this is interesting for several reasons:

• It shows Microsoft getting more serious about "real" BPM support
• Like most serious BPM companies, Microsoft recognizes that decision management, using business rules, is important also
• Fair Isaac already uses many of these Microsoft technologies in conjunction with business rules managed in Blaze Advisor (in ScoreNet for instance) so we know this works
• Because Blaze Advisor supports the integration of predictive models into decision services built with it, this alliance means that decisions using rules and analytics can be deployed effectively into processes being managed on .NET.
• Microsoft is upgrading its BPEL support and that will aid in adoption

There's a lot about decision management in BPM on this blog and my other one.

You know, on balance this should have had a shameless commerce warning. oh well.

Technorati Tags: .NET, BPMS, BRMS, business process management, business rules, Microsoft, Business Process Alliance