ILOG and HANDYSOFT Announce Seamless Interoperability of Business Process and Business Rule Management Systems

BizFlow Customers Can Now Leverage The Power of JRules To Rapidly and Easily Alter Corporate Policies

GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, ORLANDO, FLA. — October 17, 2005 – HandySoft Global Corporation, a world leader in business process management (BPM) solutions, and ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), the market-leader in business rules management systems, today announced from Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2005 the seamless interoperability of BizFlow® and ILOG JRules™. By integrating BizFlow and JRules via Web Services, business users can leverage the power of JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s business rules management systems (BRMS) product line, to easily create and edit corporate policies that govern complex business processes managed through BizFlow, HandySoft’s award-winning BPM platform. The interoperability of these two products empowers business users to rapidly respond to changing business dynamics, competitive forces, and regulations, especially those in the financial services and government sectors.

“The need for time-to-market response to business change is overwhelming, and it is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on businesses, including increased regulatory change,” writes Jim Sinur, Vice President of the Gartner, in a December 2004 Research Note entitled Taking Rule Technologies For a Test Drive. “Organizations are under duress to become adaptable and apply the knowledge captured in rule sets to outflank competition and deal with changing business environments. Business users want to change rules without going through a long-running change process that is, at best, measured in days and, at worst, in weeks and months. We expect response times to move to hours as organizations move toward ‘zero time to market’. Business agility will continue to require friendly business rule engine changes in a real-time fashion, increasing the use of flexible rule technology.”

Using the integration package provided by ILOG and HandySoft and available immediately from both companies, organizations can use ILOG JRules to create and edit business rules that underlie corporate policies. ILOG JRules also provides the means for deploying these business rules as reusable services within multiple business processes. With the seamless integration to BizFlow, business process owners can first design and then automate these processes, accessing the rules developed in JRules as a “decision service”, thereby reducing the cost and complexity of integration projects while increasing their strategic value. The interoperability of these solutions allows users to build flexible service-oriented architectures (SOA) by leveraging existing resources, while minimizing the cost of deploying new applications.

“Our customers, particularly in financial services and government, are using BizFlow to manage and automate increasingly complex processes. As a result, we are seeing an increased demand for the capabilities offered by BizFlow’s integration with ILOG’s JRules: the ability to develop business rules in plain language and publish them as reusable decision services,” said Daniele Chenal, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at HandySoft Global. “The proven interoperability of BizFlow and JRules will provide our joint customers with the ease-of-use and flexibility that will enable them to save time and money.”

Business Rule Management Systems are essential to BPM applications because they ensure the highest levels of agility and customization for these applications. Using a BRMS, business policies can be managed separately from the rest of the application, eliminating the need to make policy changes to a BPM application through traditional software coding. The resulting solution provides for the continuous adjustment of processes in response to changing business conditions, and allows business users to maintain the application, lowering IT maintenance costs. Currently, more than 40 Global 2000 organizations use ILOG’s BRMS products in combination with a BPM solution. The company also offers more comprehensive technical integrations with BPM vendors, including HandySoft.

“BPM and BRMS provide a potent combination for SOA initiatives because they enhance the business agility and time-to-market benefits inherent with SOA by giving more process control to end-users,” said ILOG Chief Operating Officer, Bounthara Ing. “The BizFlow and JRules combination will give customers the tools necessary to fully leverage the business value of SOA.”

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 has twice been named the BRMS market leader by IT research firm IDC. Customers of the award-winning ILOG JRules include CitiStreet, VSP, eBay, Zurich, MetLife, Sabre and many other leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of the annual planning efforts for more than 10,000 IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises. Attendees are responsible for more than $35 billion in IT spending for their respective companies, and rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. For more information, please visit:

www.gartner.com/2_events/symposium/2005/sym15.jsp.

About ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,500 global corporations and more than 465 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 650 people worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.ilog.com.

About HandySoft Global Corporation
HandySoft Global Corporation is the premier provider of configurable software solutions that simplify and automate business processes; capture and enforce best practices; improve productivity and quality while reducing costs; integrate information technology; and foster collaboration among employees, customers, and partners.

The foundation for HandySoft's industry and departmental solutions is BizFlow®, the award-winning platform for business process management, automated workflow, and collaboration. BizFlow offers complete capabilities for building and managing automated business processes, including tools for designing and monitoring the processes, presenting and accessing work, integrating existing IT systems, and administering the platform itself. As a global solutions provider, HandySoft Global is headquartered in Vienna, VA, USA, with offices in Sydney, Australia; and London, UK, and with strategic partner representation throughout the world. HandySoft has implemented process management solutions at hundreds of sites worldwide. For more information call +1-703-442-5600, email info@handysoft.com or visit http://www.handysoft.com/pr87.

HandySoft, the HandySoft logo, BizFlow, and BizFlow Accelerator Suites are trademarks of HandySoft Global Corporation or HandySoft Corporation. ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.