John Bates, Progress Software: Corticon Technologies Bought for Business Rules

December 7, 2011

Progress Software has completed the acquisition of Corticon Technologies, a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, California.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Corticon is recognized as a leading Business Rules Management System (BRMS) vendor that enables organizations to make better, faster decisions by automating business rules. The company’s patented “no-coding” rules engine automates sophisticated decision processes, empowering organizations to increase efficiencies, operate more responsively and reduce rule development and change cycles by 90 percent.

The Corticon BRMS services and related products are used by many of the world's largest financial services, insurance, and eCommerce companies as well as federal and state government organizations, collectively automating millions of decisions per day to improve productivity and customer service. Corticon’s model-driven approach also makes rules accessible to business domain experts who can maintain them directly, making rules easier to adapt to changing market conditions.

Dr. John Bates, chief technology officer, Progress Software said: “Within modern responsive businesses, the need to make informed and accurate decisions ‘in the moment’ is critical. High quality real-time decisions are key to avoid fraudulent transactions, to comply with complex and evolving regulations and to generally make the right decision for the business at the right time. The acquisition of Corticon reinforces Progress’ commitment to deliver operational responsiveness by helping customers build highly agile, responsive business systems with models and tools that maximize simplicity and accelerate time-to-value.”

Jo Lee Hayes, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Technology at Sallie Mae noted: “Within our business processes, accurate real-time decisions are key. Decision management, powered by the Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite, plays a critical role in Sallie Mae’s ability to deliver premier service and value to our customers, and we’re therefore thrilled about this acquisition because Corticon provides a market-leading decision management engine. Corticon provides easy-to-use tools that enable us to model and change rules ourselves, its tools check the integrity of rules before going live, thus optimizing performance while reducing the cost of testing and the risk of run-time problems.”

Dr. Mark Allen, founder and former chief executive officer of Corticon, now a member of the office of Progress' CTO, added: “The Corticon Business Rules system is a perfect complement to the Progress RPM suite. Corticon worked hard to maintain our position as a leader in the BRMS space. However, for emerging use cases, rules alone are sometimes not enough; to meet the holistic needs of customers, a number of technology areas need to converge. Many of our customers integrate rules alongside their BPM and SOA projects. Our combined expertise uniquely positions Progress to facilitate a truly responsive business.”

Corticon products will be integrated into the Progress RPM suite, which combines Business Process Management (BPM), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA), and Business Analytics through the Progress Control Tower product. The Progress Corticon BRMS offering will enhance business decision making for all enterprises.