Likelihood to Recommend As an open source rule engine and product suite, Drools is well suited for the small and middle scale business to manage and integrate the rules to build the rule-driven system which can process the business-critical data and events to produce the automated decision. It is better to use Drools in the well-secured environment (back-end behind the DMZ), not putting it on the customer-facing front or exposing it directly the to public where may bring direct security risk in the enterprise environment. Drools still needs a lot hardening on the security side.
Read full review Oracle BPM is well suited to organizations and environments that have a good understanding of their business processes and organizational structures. Trying to introduce a tool such as Oracle BPM into the organization without a good grasp on how the business operates is a recipe for disaster as the implementation will uncover all of the dirty secrets of an organizations business processes and bring them to light. BPM is not to be utilized for smaller service orchestrations or technical service implementations, these should be handled by the Oracle SOA Suite using the BPEL process manager, leaving BPM to handle the organizational business processes, referring to and including lower level services and BPEL processes as needed.
Read full review Pros Writing rules with business focus Rules evolution and maintenance separate business logic from program code Read full review Oracle BPM [Suite] can support unlimited number of cases. No limitations in cases raised. Oracle Weblogic can handle multiple traffic. [It] can handle lots of heavy load[s]. Oracle BPM has extensive integration with database[s]. Huge number[s] of customization can be created. Read full review Cons Fusion doesn't support persistence of working memory, which brings some extra high availability risk to our business. Guvnor still has a lot room to be implemented, it is not so user-friendly for non-technical people, so a lot of business users complain it is hard to master. Rule execution server doesn't even have JMX implemented, hard to be monitored. Drools is still lacking support for key Web services standards. Read full review Oracle BPM is left behind by other tools more modern in terms of user experience, usability and ability to integrate with everything else. To really harvest the potential of Oracle BPM you need to do it in JDeveloper and with ADF. This restricts its usage to very technical people. The administration of the Oracle BPM tools has really put a burden on our team. It is running on Weblogic and we experience issues very often either with performance or with a bad configuration of the system. As with all Oracle products, the price can be an issue for smaller shops. Read full review Likelihood to Renew In many scenarios it should have provided more features. It took a lot of effort while debugging, making it difficult to maintain.
Read full review Usability Not easy to debug errors.
Read full review Implementation Rating Overall satisfactory
Read full review Alternatives Considered I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.
Read full review We evaluated Bonita and found that it might fit a smaller-sized company better; we found that Oracle
BPM Suite scaled much more evenly. We almost went with one of the competitors, but in the end chose Oracle
BPM Suite after we factored in the cost of VMware licensing. There are literally tons of analytics on the back end which are great for upper management, but not so much for average users, but this fits our business model quite well.
Read full review Return on Investment The IT department quickly adopted Drools as it is a very good java-based rule engine, which saves a lot of time to meet the project timeline and balanced our business requirements. Recently we start considering the OpenRules, which may be more business user-friendly. Read full review You'll most certainly need a deep dive and extensive training before your users can even think of using the product and they are very expensive. Lack of documentation makes it very difficult to manage the application if any error is encountered which will result in you ending up hiring a dedicated person to look into the application once it's deployed. For a very large org., if properly implemented and used, it can help identify the cost-intensive and inefficient processes. Read full review ScreenShots