Company News

ILOG China

All-new location in Shanghai
To further its commitment to China’s software market, ILOG has moved all of its Shanghai operations to a new building that will enable the company to readily expand to meet demand for ILOG products and services in the region. Located in Shanghai’s new Pudong Software Park, the four-story, 2,300-square-meter building was designed to support business activities that include management, sales, consulting, customer support, training and marketing.

The building will also house the ILOG Development Center, which provides services and custom solutions for both domestic and international markets. The center employs 60 software development experts and has plans to expand.

First for Pudong Software Park
The move makes ILOG the first French company to set up shop in the new business park. The Consul General of France in China, French business leaders and ILOG executives, as well as local government officials and representatives of Fudan University, attended the building’s opening ceremony in mid-April.

ILOG has more than 130 customers and more than 20 business partners in China. It counts among its customers industry leaders China Construction Bank, CPIC, Baoshan Steel Corporation, Huawei and Shanghai Stock Exchange, and among its partners system integrators Digital China, Asiainfo and Neusoft.

“ILOG’s expansion in China is timely,” says Bounthara Ing, ILOG’s deputy CEO and executive vice president in charge of Asia-Pacific operations. “There is a rising need for services and software to help Chinese companies better manage business change and complexity in this fast-moving economy. We will continue to invest in a network of reliable local partners and strong academic alliances to train local talent in ILOG optimization tools, business rule management systems and visualization software.”

Visit ILOG China’s website at www.ilog.com.cn.

 

 

Intelligent Enterprise

Editors’ picks for 2008
ILOG is among the companies that received Intelligent Enterprise’s 2008 Editors’ Choice Awards for “helping organizations to move toward the ideal expressed by the name Intelligent Enterprise.”

Exclusively focused on technologies that form strategic applications vital to business, Intelligent Enterprise (IE: www.intelligententerprise.com) considered scores of companies in putting together this year’s list of winners, the ninth assembled by the Web-based magazine.

With the help of more than a dozen contributors, IE editors selected 48 companies that exhibited the greatest influence on the software industry. They described ILOG as “innovating in the area of decision services that can be quickly composed and deployed and then rapidly adapted and modified by nonprogrammers as business conditions and priorities change.”

ILOG is no stranger to the awards. It has been selected before for providing solutions that make companies more agile and competitive.

 

 

 

Truffle 100:

ILOG in 30th position
In 2007, ILOG climbed three spots to 30th position in the Truffle 100, a top list of Europe’s biggest software companies. The list is assembled annually by Truffle Capital (www.truffle.com), a leading European venture capital firm, with the help of CXP, a market research organization that focuses on software, and IDC, the premier global market intelligence firm.

The Truffle 100 highlights those companies whose potential and success have an impact on Europe. Since being introduced two years ago, the Truffle 100 has become a reference used widely by software vendors, industry analysts and public authorities to track the success of European software companies.

“Software is now a full-blown industry that is experiencing compelling growth, is in continuous transformation, and serves as an engine of job and value creation,” explains the Truffle 100 site (www.truffle100.com). “Much more than a short-lived phenomenon or a passing fad, the growth in the software sector is a fundamental trend to cultivate and nurture over the long term.”

 

 

 

 

Eclipse

Major contributions to community
ILOG recently delivered a big boost to the Eclipse community with three major contributions to the organization’s open-source programs.

The Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org) is a nonprofit organization aimed at building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across its life cycle. The organization’s projects have produced an open-source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.

ILOG became the first business rule vendor to join the Eclipse Consortium in February 2004. Its latest contributions – the Agile Business Rules Development (ABRD) methodology, a Java™ to C# source code converter, and greater involvement in the Albireo Rich Client Platform (RCP) project – will help developers build robust applications with the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF).

Free methodology for rule applications
ILOG’s ABRD is a free, vendor-neutral methodology that mitigates risks associated with new business rule initiatives by providing a structured, well-documented approach for developing rule-based applications. It saves developers from having to use ad-hoc processes or creating their own best practices.

Says Ricardo Balduino, Eclipse project committer and senior IBM software engineer: “ABRD allows ILOG to show organizations that are looking to create rule-based applications how to more easily use and benefit from BRMS technology, a weakness in the industry until now.”

Converter and Albireo project
The source code converter translates Eclipse Java projects into Microsoft Visual Studio C#, a language used with Microsoft’s .NET platform. An online help forum is available for the converter, which was developed and proven by Alexandre Fau, Java/.NET architect at ILOG. The Albireo project is focused on developing RCP applications. ILOG is one of two companies spearheading the project, and contributing visualization expertise for improving the ease in which native Java and Eclipse user interfaces work together. The project will make the use of Swing Java graphics easier and further reduce the entry barriers encountered by new RCP adopters.

 

 

 

INFORMS

ILOG CPLEX in Seattle
At the latest INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle (www.informs.org), attendees were introduced to ILOG CPLEX 11, the fastest and smartest version of ILOG’s market-leading mathematical programming software.

ILOG also used the event to launch the latest release of the ILOG Optimization Suite, which includes ILOG CPLEX, ILOG CP Optimizer, ILOG OPL Development Studio and ILOG Optimization Decision Manager (ODM).

More than 4,000 people attended the event, coming from different countries and representing companies in industries that include manufacturing, transportation and logistics. One of the conference’s main sponsors, ILOG ran a booth and provided free workshops and software tutorials on its products.

ILOG had more than a dozen people from sales, marketing, product management and R&D at the event. They gave presentations on several subjects, including automatic parameter tuning with ILOG CPLEX and generating multiple solutions for mixed integer programming (MIP) problems.

Members of ILOG’s optimization marketing team gave a talk on using ILOG OPL Development Studio in the classroom, and Ed Kiraly of ILOG visualization marketing gave a presentation on visualization in optimization and simulation applications.

Bixby gets Lanchester
Dr. Robert Bixby was given the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for contributions to operations research and the management science at the event. He received the award along with co-authors for “The Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Study.”

Dr. Bixby also gave a keynote presentation at the conference, in which he shared his insights on the real role of optimization in the management sciences, and what has changed, where successes have been seen, and what are the primary hurdles to optimization’s becoming one of the standard approaches in addressing core business problems.

 

 

 

REWERSE

Reactive Web with BRMS
The switch from a passive to an active Web is the objective of considerable research today. Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics (REWERSE: www.rewerse.net) is a European initiative aimed at establishing a scientific community and technologies to support Internet reasoning languages. ILOG participated in REWERSE’s last summer school, Reasoning Web 2007, at the Technical University of Dresden. In a presentation titled “Reactive Rules on the Web,” an ILOG team led by principal architect Philippe Bonnard presented a paper and conducted an exercise that gave attendees hands-on experience in using ILOG’s business rule management system (BRMS) to update the rules used by a demo application.

The paper covered different approaches to programming rule-based reactive systems, which have the ability to detect events and respond to them automatically in a timely manner. These systems are needed on the Web to bridge the gap between the existing, passive Web, where data sources can only be accessed to obtain information, and the dynamic Web, where data sources are enriched with reactive behavior.

Crucial to these systems are the quality and currency of their business rules. The presenters employed 30 computers to demonstrate how ILOG had overcome this problem. Attendees used the computers and an interface normally kept on the Internet to access and update business rules stored in a central repository on one of the presenters’ laptops. As the rules were modified, attendees could see how they were applied by the demo application, a ticket purchasing system called Rail Ways 2007.

“It proved to be the highlight of the presentation,” says Bruno Berstel, principal scientist, ILOG BRMS. “Attendees were very impressed, and said they felt ILOG had mastered the technology and had the best solution for this sort of operation.”

REWERSE involves 27 European research and industry organizations from 14 European countries and is funded by the EU Commission and Switzerland.