EDITORIAL
By Pierre Haren, ILOG CEO

This issue of the ILOG Connection was supposed to be part of the 2001 ILOG International Users Meeting in October. But as with most companies worldwide, we found ourselves shocked and saddened by the September terrorist attacks in the United States.

Because of this great tragedy, we have decided to postpone this year's users meeting. Many of our customers have already been told by their companies to refrain from traveling, while others would rather not worry about traveling at this time, especially internationally.

The new dates for the users meeting, which will still be held in Versailles, are April 11-12, 2002.

Additionally, we plan to have a group of Web-based conferences on ILOG strategy and products on Oct. 25, 2001. We have a lot of exciting news about the evolution of our product line, and we want to share it with you.

Please set aside time to join us for these conferences.

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FOCUS

Online Decision Support
Better Web personalization

The vast variety of products and services available through the Internet has both simplified and complicated shopping online. While ordering has been rendered more convenient, selection has been made more difficult for many by the tremendous number of choices.

ILOG enables companies to excel in both ordering and selection. The leading suppliers of Internet solutions are rapidly accepting ILOG's business rule and optimization products as their principle enablers for helping customers obtain the right products or services.

Common denominator
Industries as diverse as finance, insurance and travel are discovering they share a common need for online applications that intelligently process customer preferences in searching for the best solutions. For all of them, ILOG business rule and optimization products provide the crucial automated support customers need to make important decisions. A typical example is Prima Solutions' system for comparing the policies of different insurance companies. Buying insurance usually involves contacting several insurers and then comparing their policies to find the right one. This can be a tedious and confusing task, as the conditions and terminology used by the companies can vary greatly among them.

The Prima platform does the hard work by standardizing the language of the policies. It then compares the criteria entered by the customer to the policies and proposes the closest matches. All this is done in real time, with the ILOG JRules business rule engine processing as many as 3 million different combinations in searching for the best policies. For online insurance portals like Assurland.com, the Prima platform is proving to be a competitive advantage. Its one-stop shopping convenience and fast, accurate policy matching have enabled Assurland.com to sign up approximately 1,000 customers a month for 19 of the top insurance companies, including Lloyd's of London, GMF and Winterthur.

Finding the right loan
First Union Home Equity Bank provides round-the-clock online service with fully optimized loan configuration. The bank's First Union Loan Arranger uses ILOG Solver to enable each loan request to be considered based on the customer's specific needs, proposing possible loan packages within seconds.

Most online loan processors use preset formulas in determining proposals. The ILOG optimization algorithms embedded in Loan Arranger support customization, and enable the application to offer alternatives if the requested loan product or amount is not available.

"Customers applying for loans want immediate decisions, but they also want to know that their requests have received careful consideration," says Chris Oddleifson, president of First Union Home Equity Bank. "Mortgage brokers, meanwhile, want technology that maximizes the potential and speed of finding the right loan products for their customers. The ability to offer instant, tailored loans online to customers, enabled by ILOG technology, is unprecedented in our industry, and we're excited by the prospects."

Product Merger: ILOG JConfigurator
ILOG has combined elements from ILOG JRules and ILOG Configurator to give developers the advantages of using business rules and optimization in Web-based services. The resulting product, ILOG JConfigurator, taps the "write one, run anywhere" ability of Java in a ready-to-use component for building a rule-based configuration application that can optimize solutions to meet the individual needs of the customer.

Equipped with a point-and-click business rule editor, ILOG JConfigurator supports the modification of configuration statements in an intuitive, guided manner using a highly expressive "natural" language pioneered with ILOG JRules. Now nonprogrammers such as marketing personnel can easily update configuration applications.

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