Camunda vs. IBM Operational Decision Manager

Camunda Platform is well suited for scenarios where there are different stages in a business flow and the flow is driven by user action at each stage. For example placing of an order on an ecommerce platform. Depending on whether user was able to make the payment or not the workflow would go to dispatch or retry stage. Now the retry stage would trigger further actions like sending follow up emails etc. Likewise, dispatch stage would have a different set of actions. Since every order is important and we need to know where it stands, using Camunda Platform is imperative. Camunda Platform might not be a right choice where just a one off thing needs to be done. For example, uploading of product information by user or periodic processing of heavy images by a worker. These are all either one step processes or periodic automated processes where we can track the status without using a business modeler like Camunda Platform.

Incentivized

IBM Operational Decision Manager can be used to manage complex business processes with less use of IT infrastructure and more use of centralized decision making. Decision-making depends on a logical framework and the creation of commands for better futuristic decisions with less time consumption and more precision and accuracy. IBM's Operational decision manager application is well suited for such scenarios where complex processes have to be streamlined.

Incentivized

• Asynchronous functionality of Camunda Platform and different types of gateways.

• Excellent stability and performance, as well as the possibility to deploy more quickly.
• Simple but effective web-based user interface that enables us to make direct updates to our policies or rules.
• Effective rule Execution Server, which allows us to assess the rules and their performance
• After the rules are delivered, business users can make changes and keep them up to date without having to know a lot about technology.

Incentivized

• Camunda expects that you will develop your own user interfaces. This is either a benefit or a barrier depending on your perspective on packaged UI.
• As an open source vendor, Camunda is under-covered in analyst reports.

• Business rule application development available only in Java, .net, and Cobol.
• Integration supports with legacy system need to be improved (Mainframe).
• Migration to latest -version (iLog JRules to ODM).

Incentivized

Camunda provides pretty standard product support offerings.

Lacks good documentation. Training and documentation is geared towards those who are already technically adept. Does not have as many data integrations as other full fledged products. Paid version of Camunda is not as fully fledged as other products.

Incentivized

When compared to other vendors in the business rule management system, IBM Operational Decision Manager stands out in dimensions of rule engine capabilities, deployment flexibility, and ease of maintenance. It offers a wide spectrum of configuration options to build applications that can be used by developed by technical and non-technical/business users.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is that we are able to ensure the business process is being followed and that results in orders getting processed successfully leading to customer satisfaction and revenue
• Another positive impact is that we are able to track any anomalies and any errors in the order flow and retry them so that users don't have a negative experience.
• A negative point is that it is an overhead to maintain so there is significant engineering effort getting invested there

Incentivized

• It has a positive impact as it provides a great way to define business rules, execute them, update them, manage different versions of rules.
• Depending on the complexity of the applications, you can have thousands of rules.
• It provides a nice way to test the rules, run simulations with different scenarios, different scales of requests and verify the decisions, performance, etc., and that helps a lot.
• Since the decisions can be exposed through REST interface, it makes it very convenient to integrate with different applications, applications using different technologies.
• The Business console makes it easy for business users to be able to define, modify rules and not have to depend on IT to do a lot of that work. This helps in bringing the time to change and use the rules to be very short as well as lets IT do more IT related tasks and provide better value to the organization.

Incentivized