JBoss®, Inc., the Professional Open Source company, today announced JBoss Rules 3.0, the newest version of the company's open source business rules engine. With JBoss Rules, one of several new product releases announced today, JBoss continues to deliver proven open source middleware products that improve business agility and solidify the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS(tm)) as the market's leading open source platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA).

JBoss Rules enables product and service offerings to be customised by applying business rules that can be applied across an SOA based on actions, events, and historical activities. With JBoss Rules, developers can quickly deploy rules that continuously make consistent decisions based on hundreds of thousands of facts. The declarative programming model of JBoss Rules provides clear data and logic separation and eliminates the time it takes developers to modify hard-coded business logic and update applications deployed across the enterprise. JBoss Rules is based on Drools, the popular open source Java-based rules engine project whose members elected to join JBoss in October 2005, and can be used as a stand alone product or integrated with JEMS.

"Enterprises today are looking for ways to automate repetitive software processes, while allowing for variations," said Pierre Fricke, director of product management, JBoss, Inc. "JBoss Rules provides a scalable solution that has zero license fees and the benefits of the JBoss Subscription standing behind it. With JBoss Rules, JBoss brings another market-leading Java product into JEMS to simplify development and deliver on our strategy of providing interoperable middleware that offers an alternative to monolithic proprietary platforms."

Daiwa Securities America Inc., a securities industry and brokerage company uses JBoss Rules to analyse trade data and check SEC compliance. Steve Dunstan, Vice President and Enterprise Systems Architect, Daiwa Securities America Inc. said: "Compliance is a major issue when dealing with trading therefore our rules engine is set up to implement Written Supervisory Procedures (WSPs). Alerts are generated to allow compliance officers to detect trades that appear suspicious. Because we have an average of 200,000 orders pass through the rules engine every day, we needed a product that would be fast, reliable and easily scalable. Our positive experience with JBoss and JEMS made the decision to implement JBoss Rules clear, and since production, we couldn't be more pleased with the results."

Key Benefits and Functionality
JBoss Rules 3.0 offers a range of enhancements that make it more flexible and easier to use. Highlights include:

* Application Simplification and Agility - JBoss Rules simplifies application development by separating business policy and rules logic from process, infrastructure and presentation logic. This modularity makes it faster and easier for business analysts, rules developers and auditors to develop, deploy, modify and manage the rules associated with a business process.

* Transparency and Reusability Across Applications- JBoss Rules enhances transparency by separating the business rules from other business and presentation logic, making it easier for business analysts and auditors to ensure that encoded business rules implement business policies precisely. Once business rules are separated from other logic, they can be more easily reused across many applications and in SOA environments. JBoss Rules also helps enterprises meet the newer, more stringent regulatory environment as driven by standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel and HIPAA.

* Efficiency and Scalability - The JBoss Rules engine can make decisions based on thousands of facts, quickly, reliably and repeatedly. JBoss Rules' ReteOO algorithm implements and extends the Rete algorithm with high performance indexing and optimisation. It works by decomposing large sets of rules into a very efficient network of nodes that index data in a similar manner to databases, which can process and react to facts far more efficiently than can be programmed manually. JBoss Rules scales extremely well, almost linearly, with increases in the number of rules and facts.

* Knowledge Base and Transfer - JBoss Rules facilitates knowledge-transfer to centralised repositories and helps combat problems due to the loss of key decision makers, managers, executives and specialists, mitigating risks by centralising key knowledge in the rules repository.

* Easy-to-Use Rules Authoring Tools - The powerful Drools Rule Language (DRL) supports all key features of the rules engine and uses Java to express field constraints, functions and consequences. The Drools Rule Language is extendable and provides support for natural language making it easy for different business process and policy creation developers and analysts to author rules. Both the standard DRL and natural language extensions are supported by JBoss

* Rules Workbench, a visual rules development environment. Additionally, rule files can be generated from Excel and Open Office Decision Tables.

Availability
JBoss Rules is licensed under the Apache Software Foundation license and is free to download and use for development and production deployments. The license also allows companies to embed and distribute JBoss Rules free of charge. JBoss Rules' zero-cost license ensures cost-effective deployment across as many systems and CPUs as the business needs require, with no hidden costs.

For more information about JBoss Rules, please visit http://www.jboss.com/products/rules.

Support and Services
JBoss provides a full range of support, training and consulting services for JBoss Rules delivered by the product experts. The JBoss Subscription, which includes 24x7 production support, indemnification and access to JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON(tm)), is available directly from JBoss, Inc. or through the company's extensive network of JBoss Certified Partners. For more information, please visit http://www.jboss.com/services/index.

About JBoss, Inc.
JBoss, Inc., the global leader in open source middleware, offers simply the better way to transform businesses through a service-oriented architecture (SOA). As the market's leading open source platform for SOA, JEMS (JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite) delivers proven performance in mission-critical environments and is backed by world-class support and service-all at a dramatically lower cost structure than proprietary systems. Fortune 500 companies such as Continental Airlines, MCI and Starwood Hotels & Resorts rely on Professional Open Source from JBoss, Inc. Certified partners offering JEMS and JBoss Subscriptions include Dell, HP, NEC, Novell, Sun Microsystems and Unisys. For more information, visit http://www.jboss.com.

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JBoss and JEMS are registered trademarks or trademarks of JBoss, Inc. in the United States and other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.