New ILOG JRules 5.0 Enhances Business and IT Collaboration
January 26 2005 - 12:06AM
PR Newswire (US)
New ILOG JRules 5.0 Enhances Business and IT Collaboration Release
Includes First-ever Support for Mission-critical Production
Environments MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and PARIS, Jan. 26
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO,
ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced the first business rule
management system (BRMS) to make it practical for business and IT
professionals to collaborate in managing business policies across
the enterprise. With ILOG JRules(TM) 5.0, ILOG has taken the lead
in providing a collaboration platform for all the stakeholders in
the policy management process -- IT professionals, business people
and systems administrators. All too often there is an awkward
relationship between business executives and IT professionals
within an organization as both groups balance a need for business
staff to control business policies and IT staff to control
complicated and sometimes fragile IT systems. A BRMS is part of an
important trend aimed at bringing business people closer to the
systems that control their business by giving them an active role
in maintaining software, specifically, automating essential
business policies and regulations. Industry analysts have indicated
the potential for technologies, like a BRMS, to enhance
collaboration between these two groups that can be misaligned at
best. "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. These pressures
will require that business people become more active participants
in the IT process," said James G. Sinur, Gartner vice president and
research fellow. "Enabling business users to change a few critical
business rules with a change cycle that bypasses the lengthy
software change cycle certainly helps businesses react faster.
Meanwhile, diligent collaboration will be required between business
and the IS organization for rule definition and management, calling
for better tools and methods to enable this collaboration." BRMS
are becoming essential elements of IT projects for businesses
worldwide, particularly redesign and re-architecting initiatives,
because they address the challenges created by faster business
cycles and change and aging software architectures that can't
accommodate change quickly enough. By allowing business users --
and not just IT staff -- to make changes to the IT infrastructure
in real-time, as business conditions and strategies change, these
tools are becoming critical for achieving business agility across
the enterprise. Concurrent Rule Creation by Developers, Business
Users New features in ILOG JRules 5.0 allow business and IT
professionals to work together more collaboratively -- including
the ability for both groups to work concurrently. Unlike other
business rule solutions on the market, the new version of ILOG
JRules supports collaboration on several versions of a business
application at the same time, providing features to support
concurrent rule development by IT development teams and rule
management by policy managers. This collaboration is possible
because ILOG JRules 5.0 includes first-ever support for repository
merging through a combination of enhancements to the rule
repository, query tool, and new best practices. Without ILOG JRules
5.0, development teams and policy managers can not efficiently
reconcile the changes each team makes to a business application
over its lifetime. "As the world leader in corrective lenses,
Essilor is providing 60 million lenses per year that have to meet
very unique requirements and combinations, representing a very wide
range of manufacturing cost options. ILOG JRules' latest
enhancements will help take our cost management to a whole new
level of automation," said Philippe Marchan, IT director for the
Finance Division, Essilor. "The new JRules not only allows us to
extend the life of our existing financial mission-critical
applications and improve business processes across the
organization, but it also enables more productive team
collaboration. From a productivity standpoint, this is huge."
First-ever Support for Mission-critical, 24x7 Business Applications
In addition to being the first to acknowledge and address the role
of systems administrators in the policy management process, ILOG
JRules 5.0 introduces the Business Rule Execution (BRE) Server, the
first rule execution environment to support the needs of
mission-critical production applications. Using BRE Server,
deployment of new business rules is greatly simplified by allowing
system administrators to easily deploy new rulesets in a 24x7
application. It also allows administrators, who manage system
performance and resources, to monitor business rule execution in
the environment they use to monitor all business applications,
including system management tools like IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView.
For the first time, administrators have the necessary visibility
and remote control to manage rule execution within specific service
levels. These features are critical for companies that have
high-availability (24/7) service expectations, including
service-level agreements with customers, and need to be able to
monitor and track performance and availability. Available
immediately, ILOG JRules 5.0 features product enhancements that
impact business rule development, management and execution. For
more information on new product enhancements, please visit
http://www.ilog.com/products/jrules . Complementing the new ILOG
JRules 5.0 is the ISIS (ILOG Solution Implementation Standard),
which applies best practices for rule application development,
allowing businesses to reduce risk and time-to-market for their
business rule applications. Because BRMS is often essential for
business process management (BPM applications, ILOG also offers
connectors for BPM solutions from leading vendors such as IBM, BEA
or Filenet for ILOG JRules 5.0. ILOG has consistently built on its
history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the industry's
leading business rule software. ILOG was recently named the BRMS
market leader by IDC, and was named to the leader quadrant of
Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines for two years
running. 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 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. The BRMS
market share leader, ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than
600 people worldwide. NOTE: ILOG is a registered trademark, and
JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other trademarks are the
property of their respective owners. DATASOURCE: ILOG CONTACT:
media, Sarah Johansen of ILOG, +1-650-567-8128, or CONTACT: Web
site: http://www.ilog.com/products/jrules Web site:
http://www.ilog.com/
Copyright