Exciting news: Progress Acquires Corticon

Today, Progress announced the acquisition of Corticon, an industry leader in the Business Rules Management System (BRMS) market. I’m incredibly excited about this acquisition. I want to take a moment to talk about why we made the decision to acquire Corticon and why I’m so thrilled.

As you know, Progress is the “responsive business specialist”. A responsive business is one that can see how effectively it is running right now and over time, that can proactively address opportunities and threats, and can continuously improve the performance of its business operations. One key part of the responsive business is decision management – making decisions in the moment. And that’s what Corticon specializes in. Corticon delivers a business rules engine that automates business decisions, enabling more efficient and responsive operations. So whether it is a complex set of rules to decide if someone qualifies for an insurance policy, or to decide whether fraud is going on, or to decide on whatever business decisions need to be made, Corticon enables that complex decision logic to be defined simply and executed efficiently. Pretty useful stuff!

The really cool thing about Corticon is that it is safe to put in the hands of a pure business user. Corticon offers graphical tools to compose rules that can automatically detect conflicts and loss of integrity in rule sets at design time. This contrasts with having to do comprehensive run-time testing using other rule approaches. With Corticon, you can detect problems before you go live. You have the necessary guard rails to de-risk the system and to improve time-to-value. That fits perfectly into Progress’ vision of empowering the business user alongside the business analyst and IT user.

Corticon will be integrated into Progress’ RPM Suite. This will combine Corticon’s BRMS with Progress’ Business Process Management (BPM), Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Business Analytics. Through the Progress Control Tower, the vision is that a single command and control interface can provide visibility and control across your business. As IDC’s Maureen Fleming said, "high quality and comprehensive rules and decision services capabilities are required for a best-of-breed platform." And we believe Corticon is the best rules engine out there. Also the Corticon team are fantastic and we welcome them whole heartedly into the Progress family.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to take a minute to view this video from Dr. Mark Allen, founder of Corticon. You’ll agree, he had remarkable vision in 2000 when he started the company. And by integrating it with our RPM suite, we are now offering customers a comprehensive single vendor solution.

We’re excited to add Mark Allen and the rest of his team at Corticon to the Progress family and are looking forward to offering our customers a better way to manage their businesses in real-time.