DevOps is the hot topic in 2018: Five reasons why Watch Now

Troubleshoot a network? No problem. Write a 3,000 word article on Kubernetes cloud container management? When do you want it. Talk to a few hundred people about Linux's history? Been there, done that. Manage a business's delivery routing and shift scheduling? I'll break out in a cold sweat.

If you too find the nuts and bolts of business processing management a nightmare, you'll want to check out Red Hat's latest program: Red Hat Decision Manager 7.

This program is the next generation of JBoss business rules management system (BRMS). This is a scalable, open-source business rules management system. It includes both business resource planning and complex event processing (CEP) technology.

By helping your organization or business capture your business logic, it enables you to automate business decisions across heterogeneous physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud environments using a modern microservices architecture. The Decision Manager 7 is fully compatible with Red Hat's Middleware portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform so you can deploy it in hybrid cloud environments.

Tools such as this often require a lot of customizing coding before they're useful. This is a low-code development tool, which enables business users to work smoothly with the application development team. If you think of it as a DevOps tool for management and developers, you won't be far wrong.

There's a real need for such programs. According to industry analyst firm IDC, non-traditional developers are expected to build 20 percent of business applications and 30 percent of new application features by 2021. If we want to avoid creating useless business process programs -- and boy haven't we all seen some of those! -- Decision Manager could be quite useful.

According to Mike Piech, Red Hat's VP and general manager of Middleware, "The notion of low-code development is less about eliminating code or cutting traditional programmers out of the application development process, and more about helping business and IT users to do what they need to do quickly and efficiently, and in a complementary manner. Ultimately, what low-code tools should offer -- and what we have built with Red Hat Decision Manager -- is not a platform geared toward one or the other, but rather a rich and tightly integrated feature set designed to provide a better user experience regardless of whether you are a business analyst or hardcore developer."

Red Hat built this platform for both traditional and cloud-native applications. It can create rules-based decision and planning microservices that can be deployed on-premises within a customer's datacenter, or as containerized services on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

OpenShift, an OpenStack and Docker cloud-based technology -- what does that have to do with business processes, you ask. Remember what I said about DevOps? It enables your business to enhance your processes with such DevOps tricks in trade as automated testing and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

Companies want business process management (BPM). A Red Hat survey found over half of Red Hat customers, 57 percent, want BPM software to automate internal processes. Others, 46 percent, want it to help support new applications, while 41 percent want it to automate external processes, e.g., processes that touch customers, partners, or suppliers. Finally, a substantial minority, 29 percent, want it to support self-service applications.

Want to give Red Hat Decision Manager a try? Red Hat Decision Manager is available for download by members of the Red Hat Developers community. Customers can get the latest updates from the Red Hat Customer Portal. Just don't ask me to work out your business processes before you try to automate them. I have enough trouble organizing my small business workflow.

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