Open Edition

My company reviewed Red Hat Decision Manager a few years ago, and are considering replacing an existing rules engine with it again. However, the product has become IBM DMOE and my main questions are (because it's not too obvious from the docs): is there a free version of DMOE? We operate in a regulated industry and need to use software that is supported with security updates, either by the vendor, or by the open source community. Cost will be a consideration of any replacement, but DMOE does have the functionality required, can someone give me an idea of what's required from cost/licensing perspective for running it in a commercial company? 

IBM DMOE and PAMOE are the tested and supported releases of the software and their cost depends on their usage based on the number of cores that the deployment needs.

IBM provides BAMOE subscriptions for both use cases (business rules and business processes). 

Security updates are included in new versions and patch releases. 

Latest release is 9.1.0.

Hi Richard,

We don't see the 9.1.0 release on the IBM Developer website yet.  When is it supposed to be available?

Thanks,

Mei See. 

You are correct, 9.1.0 release has not been published to Developer Program yet, and I do not know when it will be.

But it is available through Passport Advantage.

Instead of using free versus another term, I'll label it as we have for the last few years both within IBM and previously in Red Hat when the Drools project was supported within there before being moved to IBM to align with strategic directions. There are 3 open source projects that make up the collective of Business Automation Manager Open Editions with Decision and Process Automation Manager Open Edition being the subsets of the product: Drools (decisions), jBPM (process automation), and Kogito (Cloud Native Architectures). With these open source projects, there are the Community releases which release on their community cadence which can be viewed as the free means of getting access to the projects and there are means of utilizing community support found within those communities. Within IBM, we release a version that we identify from the community, go through code hardening, security scans, etc and put a supported timeline on said release. This supported timeline means we will work on bug fixes and security updates that can be addressed in the particular version and also work to get them merged back into the latest community release. One of the biggest benefits to the Enterprise model is that you do not have to migrate to a newer version for every patch/bug fix, whereas in community this can be a common occurrence. We release regular patches and updates for these versions.

One of the other major benefits to purchasing the Enterprise subscription is that this is not a situation where the developers who are working on the support of the product are brought in to support this software who might be Java experts, but not in the particular solution; at IBM we have a team dedicated to the development, maintenance and support of the the three open source projects. This gives you, the subscriber, access to the roadmap that we are working on within the community, resources who are well-versed and familiar with the technologies and ultimately can interject influence on where the projects can go. Another benefit is that within the Enterprise supported version, you have access to IBM Expert Labs who can assist with your move from an existing rules engine to the platform.

If you want to try out the Enterprise version of the projects, you can utilize the BAMOE Developer Program to try out the software. This version does not include IBM 24/7 support or usage in production, but would provide a means for getting started. If you need more details, please reach out to your IBM Data&AI sales rep for more of how we can help!