ILOG JRules enhances agility as part of radian's new information technology platform

Rules-driven Platform Will Help Systems Be More Responsive To Business and Customer Demands

GARTNER SYMPOSIUM, ITXPO 2002, ORLANDO, Fla. - October 8, 2002 -- ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext SICOVAM: 006673), the leading provider of enterprise-class software components, and Radian Group Inc., a leading credit enhancement provider to global financial and capital markets, today announced that ILOG JRules^TM business rule management system (BRMS) was selected to enhance business agility as part of Radian's new transaction processing platform. Radian's new system is considered a key technological component of the company's strategy to build its reputation as a diversified global provider of financial guaranty, mortgage insurance and mortgage services. This strategy requires a more flexible, customer-centric IT architecture, which will be facilitated by ILOG JRules BRMS.

Business rule technology is considered key for giving enterprise IT architectures the ability to more quickly and easily address changing business conditions and time-to-market demands. Business rule technologies allow the business rules that drive business process flows, applications and the enterprise architecture to be changed more easily - and allows these changes to be performed by non-IT personnel. For example, ILOG JRules allows business users to modify business rules as the business needs change and also simulate the impact of changing or adding new business rules.

"ILOG JRules will enable Radian to respond faster and more cost-effectively to changes in our business strategy. It will also help give us the flexibility to be more responsive to our customers by ensuring consistency of customer information across all of our systems and business lines," said Liz Shuttleworth, senior vice president and chief information officer, Radian. "We also believe that rules will empower the end-user and reduce the bottleneck in our IT department. By changing the people who have a stake in and maintain the system, it allows the business to focus on more analytical and strategic issues."

Radian's next-generation transaction processing platform, which is based on Java, will link all core operational systems in the company. It will handle most of the company's major transactions across all lines of business, including financial guaranty, mortgage insurance and mortgage services. Rules embedded in each proprietary system will be replaced with rules created and stored in ILOG JRules as part of the Radian system for reuse across the company in many different applications. This "enterprise-wide" use of rules is a big part of the technology's appeal.

Since ILOG JRules has comprehensive rule management features, the hundreds of thousands of rules driving pricing, underwriting, customer profiles, product profiles, policy servicing, as well as loss mitigation and compliance can be managed in a central repository. In addition to facilitating enterprise-wide rule management, the repository means a faster system response time and will give Radian control over rule versions, including knowing what rules were executed and when.

"We selected ILOG JRules because of its rich user interface, and its business approach that puts the power of the customization in the user's hands," said Shuttleworth. "The performance and scalability of JRules were other key reasons for selecting the product. We will have the ability to deliver responses to customers within seconds and the system can expand to meet our needs as our business grows."

The initial deployment of ILOG JRules will be in Radian's pricing application where rules will be used to dynamically handle rate changes without bringing the system down. Radian currently handles up to one million mortgage pricing requests a month.

ILOG's JRules was the first rule engine to integrate with Enterprise Java Beans for applications running on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform, a key requirement in Radian's decision to choose this product. The product is widely used by leading financial institutions and insurance companies to enable STP, a major financial services industry initiative that will enable the automation and management of business processes and decisions in real-time.

ILOG JRules was recently awarded the 12th Annual Productivity Award by CMP's Software Development Magazine, recognizing the emergence of business rules as a key technology driving business agility. The product was also recently awarded the Crossroads 2002 Award, which recognizes innovative new technologies that have achieved real-world business results.

About ILOG ILOG's innovative enterprise-class software components and services have helped companies maximize their business agility and improve operating efficiency for over 10 years. Over 1000 global corporations and more than three hundred leading software vendors rely on ILOG's business rules, optimization and visualization technologies to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. For more details, please visit www.ilog.com.

ILOG is a registered trademark, and JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.