One of the fascinating things about rules is just what you can do with them once there is a convenient way of making them work automatically. That means rules engines and, while it may be easy to assume that automated rules processing and management is of necessity still quite simple, there is a subtlety growing in that business which is showing all the signs of moving beyond the ability to run just a process, and onto the ability to genuinely manage complex issues.

Take, as an example, some recently undertaken work by rules engine vendor, inRule, on behalf of an outsourcing and remote hosting service provider. It is easy to imagine where a rules engine would fit into that environment. It would be monitoring such areas as the capacity and predicted loading on available resources, for example, so that the system kept running as well as possible. It would be comparing contracted service levels against current and predicted levels given the overall upstream workload and capacity available.

The objective here would be, not unreasonably, the protection of the business of the outsource/hosting company