10/17/2005

ILOG and HandySoft today announced an integration between their business process and business rule management systems.

The companies furnished the following details:

The relationship means that customers can use ILOG’s JRules to manage and change the business policies that underlie the business processes managed by HandySoft’s BizFlow solution.

By integrating BizFlow and JRules via Web Services, business users can leverage the power of Jrules, businesses can rapidly respond to changing business dynamics, competitive forces, and regulations, especially those in the financial services and government sectors.

This puts the business user -– the policy owner -– in control, allowing them to adjust processes in response to changing business conditions, ultimately lowering IT maintenance costs.

To further interoperability between business process and business rules systems, ILOG has partnered with the BPM leaders -- Axway, BEA, EMC-Documentum, FileNet, Fuego, Fujitsu, HandySoft, IBM, Oracle, Vitria and W4 -- to help customers get the most from their business agility initiatives.

According to December 15, 2004 Gartner report entitled “Taking Rule Technologies For a Test Drive”, “The need for time-to-market response to business change is overwhelming, and it is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on businesses, including increased regulatory change Organizations are under duress to become adaptable and apply the knowledge captured in rule sets to outflank competition and deal with changing business environments. Business users want to change rules without going through a long-running change process that is, at best, measured in days and, at worst, in weeks and months. We expect response times to move to hours as organizations move toward ‘zero time to market’. Business agility will continue to require friendly business rule engine changes in a real-time fashion, increasing the use of flexible rule technology.” ILOG JRules also provides the means for deploying these business rules as reusable services within multiple business processes. With the seamless integration to BizFlow, business process owners can first design and then automate these processes, accessing the rules developed in JRules as a “decision service”, thereby reducing the cost and complexity of integration projects while increasing their strategic value. The interoperability of these solutions allows users to build flexible service-oriented architectures (SOA) by leveraging existing resources, while minimizing the cost of deploying new applications. “Our customers, particularly in financial services and government, are using BizFlow to manage and automate increasingly complex processes. As a result, we are seeing an increased demand for the capabilities offered by BizFlow’s integration with ILOG’s JRules: the ability to develop business rules in plain language and publish them as reusable decision services,” said Daniele Chenal, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at HandySoft Global. “The proven interoperability of BizFlow and JRules will provide our joint customers with the ease-of-use and flexibility that will enable them to save time and money.” Business Rule Management Systems are essential to BPM applications because they ensure the highest levels of agility and customization for these applications. Using a BRMS, business policies can be managed separately from the rest of the application, eliminating the need to make policy changes to a BPM application through traditional software coding. The resulting solution provides for the continuous adjustment of processes in response to changing business conditions, and allows business users to maintain the application, lowering IT maintenance costs.

Currently, more than 40 Global 2000 organizations use ILOG’s BRMS products in combination with a BPM solution. The company also offers more comprehensive technical integrations with BPM vendors, including HandySoft. “BPM and BRMS provide a potent combination for SOA initiatives because they enhance the business agility and time-to-market benefits inherent with SOA by giving more process control to end-users,” said ILOG Chief Operating Officer, Bounthara Ing. “The BizFlow and JRules combination will give customers the tools necessary to fully leverage the business value of SOA.”