EDITORIAL
By Pierre Haren, ILOG CEO

Once again, ILOG is listed in the leadership quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for business rule products as a direct result of our hard work on the fronts for both technology and execution. In technology, the new features of ILOG JRules 4.5 demonstrate the competence and dedication of our R&D team. Our customers can truly deliver agile applications whose rapid evolution must mirror ever-changing business conditions. The quality of these applications need not be compromised for expedience, thanks to our growing number of validation methods and tools. In terms of execution, the rapid growth of our ILOG JRules revenue is a result of the confidence our customers have in our ability to remain the leading provider of business rule engines for years to come.

ILOG JRules 4.5 greatly advances the management of business policies and processes. Introducing features that include support for business process management (BPM) and Web services, it streamlines the management of business rules, helping companies lower costs, make better decisions and handle risk more effectively.

“In ILOG JRules 4.5, ILOG has taken a major step toward the promise that business users with spreadsheet skills will be able to configure high-level business rules to drive policy-based actions . . . to meet fast-changing requirements,” says John Rymer, senior industry analyst at Giga Information Group, Inc., in the report “ILOG JRules 4.5: Rules Made Practical for a Wider Range of Development Shops,” March 2003.

Workflow support
Added to a BPM solution, ILOG JRules 4.5 provides significant functionality for greatly improving enterprise operations and increasing return on investment. Most BPM solutions, however, do not support business rule management, reducing their business agility and ability to implement changes.

ILOG JRules 4.5 is the first business rule product to incorporate both workflow modeling graphics and constraint-based optimization technology designed specifically for advancing BPM. It provides a new RuleFlow feature that leverages ILOG’s workflow visualization technology in orchestrating business rule packages. Using ILOG’s advanced optimization technology, ILOG JRules 4.5 can also do important consistency checking to ensure accurate, cross-application implementation of rules.

Other important new features:

• Point-and-click rule deployment that accelerates business rule implementation
• Full support of Web services, including deployment of business rule applications as Web services and invocation of Web services with business rules