Integration with Oracle BPEL Process Manager Allows Customers to Create and Edit Business Rules From Within Their BPM Applications

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 6, 2005 –ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced the availability of integration betweenILOG JRules™ and Oracle® BPEL Process Manager. By integrating the ILOG and Oracle products business users can use ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s business rule management systems (BRMS) product line, to create and edit policies from within Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) applications in a familiar language rather than having to rely on IT staff. The two products used together can enable faster response times to changing business environments and government regulations, as well as competitive pressures for organizations, especially those in financial services, insurance, government, telecommunications, retail and manufacturing industries.

Customers can use ILOG JRules as a “decision service” for Oracle BPEL Process Manager, providing the means for publishing rules and rule sets as reusable services that result from multiple business processes. This allows users to build flexible service-oriented architectures (SOA) by leveraging existing resources, while minimizing the cost of deploying new applications. Oracle BPEL Process Manager and the JRules-enabled decision service are critical components of a BPM solution, each reducing the cost and complexity of integration projects while increasing their strategic value.

“The global economy is operating in real-time, around the clock and organizations need to ensure their business change is operating at the same pace. That means ensuring systems have the flexibility to respond to changes rapidly and effectively,” said Amlan Debnath, vice president, Server Technologies at Oracle. “ILOG’s support of Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides our joint customers with a combination of flexibility, scalability and performance that is required in today’s business environment.”

BRMS: Essential to BPM and SOA
Business rule management systems (BRMS) combine with business process management systems (BPMS) to achieve the highest levels of process agility. A BRMS allows business policies to be managed separately from the rest of the application, eliminating the need to make policy changes to a BPM application through traditional software coding. This approach also means policies can be managed through BRMS-based decision services as part of a Service-oriented architecture (SOA). The resulting solutions provide for the continuous adjustment of processes in response to changing business conditions and allow business users to maintain the application, lowering IT maintenance costs. The BRMS market leader, ILOG is also the leader in technical integration with BPM vendors, including industry leaders Axway, BEA, EMC-Documentum, FileNet, Fuego, Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Vitria and W4. Currently, more than 30 Global 2000 organizations use ILOG’s BRMS products in combination with a BPM solution.

Oracle BPEL Process Manager, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, connects and coordinates business processes that span multiple departments and applications, combining processes and policies contained in disparate packaged applications and legacy systems into one platform. A key goal of Oracle’s BPM approach is to delegate the definition, coordination and execution of business processes to the business analysts – not IT – allowing them to visually define the business flows between applications, departments, business partners and individuals. ILOG JRules extends this functionality by allowing the business analysts to have access to the policies that are ultimately driving the business processes.

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the industry’s leading business rule software. For the third year in a row, ILOG has been named to the leader quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines and ILOG was recently named the BRMS market leader by IT research firm IDC. ILOG’s BRMS customers include eBay, Freddie Mac, Sabre, Zurich American and many other leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide.

ILOG is a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork.

About ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,000 global corporations and more than 400 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), optimization and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 600 people worldwide.

ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Retek are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.