Red Hat drives value with Launch of JBoss Enterprise BRMS

Business analysts can now leverage open source to automate business decisionsto help reduce costs and drive value

Malaysia, 20 May 2009 - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open sourcesolutions, today announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System(BRMS), an open source business rules solution that enables easy business policy and rules development,access, and management. JBoss Enterprise BRMS allows customers to reduce development time toupdate applications and processes with the latest business rules and policies. Automating businessdecisions with JBoss Enterprise BRMS can help a business to run faster and enable business processstakeholders the ability to rapidly implement change. Now, organizations can automate the delivery ofcustomer-facing updates, promotions, loyalty programs, discounts, or payment terms among others,designed cut time to deployment with greater accuracy, and at a lower cost.

“In today's economic environment businesses must be able to quickly adapt and respond to regulations,customer trends, opportunities and threats,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware BusinessUnit, Red Hat. “JBoss Enterprise BRMS is designed to give our customers a competitive advantage in themarketplace by helping them increase revenue, offer relevant products and services faster and improvecustomer satisfaction, all while reducing their overall IT costs.”

Business rules are parameters that describe how an organization performs work. Best practices requirebusiness rules to be maintained separately from the software applications and services they govern inorder to maximize agility. If business rules are duplicated or scattered across many applications, updatesare costly, error prone, and take weeks or months to implement. With JBoss Enterprise BRMS,enterprises can update their business rules to reflect the day-to-day business and regulatoryenvironment as quickly as in a few hours or days. Additionally, JBoss Enterprise BRMS enables nontechnicalstaff to manage the business process in an organization without programming.

"The combination of tight budgets, the increasing maturity of the BRMS, and the continual improvementof open source technologies creates a nearly perfect disruptive storm in the BRMS market", said StephenD. Hendrick, Group Vice President for Application Development and Deployment Research at IDC. "Opensource BRMS products that get rule authoring, processing, and management right combined with asignificantly lower TCO will receive a strong positive reception in the market."

“From increased regulatory requirements to market pressures, the ability for organizations to rapidlyrespond and modify business rules is paramount. As a service provider we consistently strive to provideinnovative and world-class solutions to our customers, Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise BRMS solution willallow us give our customers an easy to use automated business rules system that will take theirbusinesses to the next level,” said Tom Stack, vice president, Ubiquitous Solutions.

JBoss Enterprise BRMS is an enterprise-ready open source business rules management system. Whendeployed with other JBoss Enterprise Middleware such as JBoss Enterprise SOA and Portal Platforms,Red Hat expects that organizations will be able to create better customer experiences by delivering upto-date service, support and product faster and with higher quality.

Key JBoss Enterprise BRMS features include:• Business Rules Engine
– The rules engine is highly flexible and can be embedded within a widevariety of enterprise applications and business processes. Rules can be updated through a rangeof tools, from editors and spreadsheets to Eclipse and Web 2.0 business analyst friendly tools,enabling greater business agility.• Web 2.0 Rules Authoring and Management Tools
– The Rich Internet Application (RIA) userinterface provides a user-friendly environment for business rule authoring and editing,versioning and deployment management. Designed for business analysts and process owners tocraft and update rule sets supporting their business processes, the tools extend the valuedelivered to a wider audience of enterprise stakeholders beyond the Java developers.• BRMS Repository
– The repository enables version control of business rules artifacts, includingfact models, enumerations, functions, domain specific languages (DSL) definitions, rules andtests. The BRMS repository provides the foundation for the Web 2.0 and other managementtools that deliver business agility not possible with traditional enterprise and web applicationdeployments.

The introduction of JBoss Enterprise BRMS is a significant addition to Red Hat’s overall middlewaresoftware strategy to offer a comprehensive portfolio of middleware products that solves applicationdevelopment, deployment and integration challenges. In addition to JBoss Enterprise BRMS, Red Hat’sopen source middleware portfolio includes JBoss application platforms, SOA platforms, portal platforms,software development tools and specialized middleware offerings to address application needs.Together these open source middleware products provide an alternative to costly propriety middleware,which can help companies to confidently and securely reduce IT costs while gaining operationalflexibility.

Additional information on the JBoss Enterprise BRMS is available online at www.jboss.com.