History

In 1984 one of the XpertRule founders, Dr Akeel Al-Attar, had a meeting with the late Professor Donald Michie which changed Akeel's professional career and lead to the creation of XpertRule Software in Feb 1985. Professor Michie was widely acknowledged as the father of AI in Europe and the UK and the brain behind the first expert system development software ExpertEase. Akeel and Professor Michie agreed to collaborate to develop the next generation Expert System software with R&D funding from the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the European Community. The result was the XpertRule business rules automation technology with focus on the ease of capturing and maintaining rules.

The XpertRule Expert System development environment was released in February 1987 and by 1990 it had several hundred blue chip clients in Europe, USA and Japan. Over the next 22 years, XpertRule Software has become a world leader in the development of business rules automation software with its technology being one of the most advanced and robust knowledge / rules engineering environments on the market today used by over 2000 users in over 20 countries.

XpertRule's technology is used by leading companies such AOL, BP, Diageo, Airbus, Schlumberger, Boeing, Alcatel, Chase Bank, Halifax Bank, Alstom, National Semiconductors, and major government departments such as Australian Taxation Office, UK Ministry of Defence, New Zealand Social Welfare, and Japan's Ministry of Construction.

In addition to developing advanced software, XpertRule has helped over 100 organisations worldwide in the successful implementation of major rules automation projects.

Over the years XpertRule has been a pioneer and an innovator in extending the envelope of business rules technology. Some important milestones:

• 1988. The first company to release a universal rule induction knowledge acquisition module for all the main expert system development environments on the market at the time.
• 1989. One of the first companies to introduce a data mining capability to discover trees from data.
• 1992. The first company to release a hybrid business rules system with Genetic algorithm based optimisation. Technology successfully deployed at blue chip clients such Diageo and Channel 4 TV.
• 1996. A pioneer in adding constraints reasoning to a business rules engine to meet the requirements for Product Configurators.
• 1997. One of the first companies to use rules automation and data mining to improve the performance of industrial processes such milling, brewing and power generation.
• 2000. Part of a European consortium to develop massively scalable data mining technology based on the XpertRule technology.
• 2002. One of the first business rules automation vendor to introduce an AJAX thin web client user interface working in conjunction with a .net / ISAPI rules engine.
• 2004. Developed XpertRule eService, a unique massively scalable diagnostics and trouble-shooting engine which does not require a server as it is based on HTML and Javascript only.
• 2006. Combined rules automation, fuzzy rules, data mining and GA technologies to develop an innovative solution for Process Performance Analysis, monitoring and control.
• 2009. Released a unique full rules engine with a complete AJAX user interface written completely in Javascript, CSS and HTML. This enables massively performant web deployment with exceptional availability (uptime). This technology underpins XpertRule's SAAS (Software as a service) offering.