INDUSTRY NEWS

Into the picture
ILOG JRules and BRMS empower business users
Accessibility and ease of use have driven the spectacular growth of the Internet as a shopping medium. Internally, companies are also leveraging the Internet to quickly and cost-effectively deliver goods and services, and perform in-house operations.

Despite the importance of Web-based applications, shrinking budgets are making them harder to build and maintain. IT is having to increasingly draw on the assistance of personnel in other departments to run public and internal systems. ILOG JRules and ILOG's Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) are bringing business users into the picture. They enable a business analyst or other nontechnical person to capture company policies and procedures behind an offering as business rules with the ILOG Business Action Language, which can be adapted to the internal language of any organization.

Once made, the rules can be centrally stored and managed with ILOG's BRMS, which can also share the rules among several applications. As ILOG JRules is fully XML compatible, it can produce rules as XML objects, further making them easier to exchange.

Faster to market with products and services
Empowering nontechnical users with ILOG business rules has proven to be a boon for many companies. Business users in industries like investment, finance and communications no longer have to wait weeks for IT to find an opportunity to work on a new offering. They can do most of the work themselves, enabling a new product or service to be made available in far less time.

This agility is both differentiating and profitable. Automation rendered with ILOG JRules and BRMS allows insurance salespeople to tap into an intranet system from virtually anywhere - even a client's home or office - and qualify an applicant within minutes. The same rules used by the salespeople are accessed by business analysts through different applications to check existing policies or perform other operations.

Enabling the business user to directly participate in the maintenance of strategic applications is one way ILOG is changing the rules of business - making products and services available faster than ever before.