COMPANY NEWS

Changing the rules of business
Enabling the reactive enterprise
By Doug Doyle, ILOG Vice President of Marketing

			Doug Doyle Vice President of Marketing ILOG

ILOG has changed its tagline. "Powering smarter software" has been replaced with "Changing the rules of business." What market changes prompted this shift? And, how did we change from improving our customers' operations to improving their business?

For 15 years, we have successfully helped our customers build advanced and highly technical software applications. These applications are used primarily to manage both capacity dependent assets, like plants, machines, telecommunications equipment, planes, ships or military gear, as well as scheduling for the manpower that complements these assets: crews, drivers, operators, military personnel, etc.

This shaped our distinctive product focus on visualization, optimization and business rules. "Smarter software applications" often require real-time data feeds coming from the operation of these assets, which in-turn dictates the graphical representations to be used, the operations to be optimized or the events to be filtered.

Results achieved by these ILOG-based applications are consistently impressive. ROI's are typically measured in weeks, if not days. Our customers require less equipment, operate more efficiently and reliably, and can better predict the level of service they offer to their own customers. In short, they improve their operations.

In the last two years, however, we have observed an important shift in the nature of the applications that our customers deploy. Today's innovative enterprise applications blend real-time data from markets, transportation systems or telecommunications equipment with something new: the increasingly available real-time information that results from the Web-based customer interactions and the internal tasks employees perform to serve these demands--configuration, pricing, order processing, billing, etc. Some of these tasks are automated with ILOG business rules, while others are linked through workflow applications whose logic is explicitly represented with business rules.

With these shifts, the scope of the usefulness of our products now spans from the technical world to the extended enterprise. More than incrementally improving our customers' business, we enable them to fundamentally change the way they do business.

The results are more reactive enterprises, which not only visualize, automate and optimize their business in real time, but can change in real-time the rules that govern their business. This enables our customers to reach unprecedented agility and efficiency. "It changes the rules of their business."

ILOG ranks among hottest
CEO listed as top visionary
ILOG has scored twice this year with Start Magazine, making the publication's lists for top companies and leading CEO visionaries. In its fifth annual list of Hottest Companies of the Year, Start upgrades ILOG to a company that "has proven to be a hot company." In a separate article - "CEO Visionaries: Faster, Smarter, Better" - Start lists ILOG CEO Pierre Haren among executives who have a clear understanding of their companies and an overall vision for today and tomorrow.