ILOG Events Blog

Unlock the Business Value in Your Legacy Systems - Recorded Webinar

Daryl Pereira — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:32:29 +0000

Jaydip Sanyal, Practice Head for Legacy Modernization with Wipro Technologies, recently joined ILOG’s Janet Wall for a presentation on how to improve your legacy applications with a business rule management system (BRMS).

Topics covered included:

Key business drivers for legacy modernization - myths and reality
How BRMS can address those drivers
How to modernize your COBOL code in three simple steps

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Integrate BRMS Across Your Organization Painlessly - Recorded Webinar

Daryl Pereira — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:27:11 +0000

Jerome Boyer, ILOG’s director of technical services, recently held a presentation going over all the architectural hurdles involved in implementing and deploying a Business Rule Management System (BRMS). In particular, he covered:

Building reusable services
SOA step-by-step
Reliable error reporting using BPM
Rule IDE and web-based authoring

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Deploy Business Rule Applications Successfully

Daryl Pereira — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:38:23 +0000

Pierre Berlandier, ILOG principal consultant, recently held a presentation going through the technical and organizational processes that should accompany deployment of a BRMS.

View the slides or recording below and learn about:

Building a BRMS management team
Assigning roles, responsibilities, and access for rule governance
Defining a rule lifecycle for your enterprise
Planning for rule deployment
Processes involved in rule change and execution
Tools you need to support a BRMS

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Forrester IT Forum — On Innovation

Susan Peters — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:05:15 +0000

Here we are demonstrating that what happens in Vegas does not, in fact, stay in Vegas. I hope a lot of people will be blogging from Forrester’s IT Forum here at the Venetian - one of those cavernous Vegas hotels. Be sure to read the Forrester blogs and James Taylor’s blog also for the blow-by-blow. Frankly, there weren’t really big ideas introduced during this year’s keynote (last year’s IT Forum introduced business technology (BT) as a complement to IT and Dynamic Business Applications), but maybe it’s a sign of the times. Fortunately, Dynamic Business Apps will be discussed again tomorrow with real-world examples that “Make it Real.” Today’s big theme was innovation. Forrester wants IT people to lead innovation in their companies rather than wait on their business owners. They claim that IT gets bogged down in cost and quality issues and that it’s hard to get money for game-changing ideas. More posts tomorrow on Dynamic Business Applications (DBA) and more “game-changing” ideas. Business rule management systems (what Forrester calls Business Rules Platforms) figure prominently in the DBA concept (not to be confused with “digital business architectures - another Forrester-ism).

Make Developing Business Rule Applications Easier

Daryl Pereira — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:22:04 +0000

When you’re building business rule applications, generic software-development methodologies just aren’t enough.

Agile Business Rule Development (ABRD) is a step-by-step process for developing business rule applications. An iterative methodology, ABRD employs agile software-development values. Rule development is organized as a series of cycles: discovery, analysis, authoring, validation, and deployment. Your team stays on schedule, delivering outstanding business rule applications.

View this free one-hour webinar and learn how to:

Leverage ABRD as first open-source methodology for business rules
Implement and deploy rules in an SOA or BPM context
Engage in rule discovery and analysis

Jerome Boyer, author of ABRD, describes the methodology and demonstrates how it works.

JavaOne: Rich Internet Applications steal the show

Daryl Pereira — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:33:55 +0000

Late spring in San Francisco signals the beginning of the summer fog but for Java developers there is a more significant annual milestone: JavaOne rolls into town. Since its inception in 1996, the conference has been the focal point for showcasing the latest and greatest in Java development. ILOG has maintained a presence here for the last decade and this year the focus is on the JViews graphical component suite.

Rich internet applications

“There is a particularly strong interest in thin client development, giving us ample opportunity to show off our Ajax components”, says Ed Kiraly from ILOG’s visualization product marketing team. “The whole Rich Internet Application (RIA) space is hot right now” explains the JavaOne veteran. Large enterprise players from Cisco to Tibco are showing a strong interest in smart thin clients and rich web interfaces. ILOG, as

ILOG’s Elixir offering built atop Adobe’s Flex framework is also interesting in this respect. Although how exactly do you hook up Java applications to this interface? Duane Nickull from Adobe answered this question for me, explaining how Adobe’s service oriented Lifecyle ES (Enterprise Suite), a J2EE server, forms the vital bridge between data and display.

Internalizing Google Map Mashups

On the subject of data and display, Ed drew my attention to a particularly interesting application of a Google Maps mashup that the JViews development team have produced. Blinking lights and bright green pipes over the map of San Francisco showed specific traffic movement across San Francisco’s highways. This in itself is nothing new and there are countless examples of these kinds of applications across the web. Where this gets interesting is when you realize the data overlayed on top of Google Maps is internal - something not possible with a generic implementation of Google’s API. Possible applications? How about an organization mapping out movements of its sales team for internal monitoring.

A global feel

So, where is most prospective interest coming from? According to ILOG sales rep Mark Steidel, booth visitors aren’t restricted to North America. There is interest from Canada and Europe and further afield Asia as well. Mark states JavaOne is by far the most important event for ILOG’s visualization product line.

The human face of Java

With the proliferation of enterprise-level development platforms over the last few years, Sun Microsystems really has its work cut out staying on top of the game.

‘Java + You’ is the JavaOne theme this year. This roughly translates as offering you (the consumer) the services you want, whether it be consumer-level or enterprise-level software. Sun is there, slap-bang in the middle. More human, nay more sexy, as Sun proved with the center-stage placement of that music god of the old-school Silicon Valley set: Neil Young. The approach has worked, if the front pages of the tech dailies are anything to go by.

Meanwhile, on the pavilion floor Project Wonderland takes pride of place among the sprawling Java booth space. This toolkit allows developers to build 3D virtual worlds ~~in Second Life~~, linking up live applications like web browsers and Sun’s own OpenOffice documents.

Off-topic

ILOG Technical Account Manager (TAM) Dan Jeffrey recommended Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s treatise on the behaviour of networks: Linked. Especially pertinent in these times when the conception, construction and management of online social networks is all the rage.

Video interview with Nicolas Robbe boosts ILOG visibility at SOA World

Daryl Pereira — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:41:33 +0000

Nicolas Robbe, ILOG’s VP Product Marketing, does a great job of positioning ILOG and BRMS in the SOA space in a recently published video interview by SYS-CON TV from the SOA World West 2007 conference in San Francisco.

INFORMS Edelman Award Winner uses ILOG CPLEX and ILOG OPL Development Studio

Irv Lustig — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:26:49 +0000

On April 14, 2008, in Baltimore, Maryland, Netherlands Railways was awarded the 2008 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The railway changed their entire timetable, originally created in 1970, to better meet the demands of the current Dutch society. From another article on the INFORMS site, we learned about the solution that was created, as well as the value of the solution.

Operations researchers at CWI and Erasmus University Rotterdam constructed an improved, cyclical timetable allowing the schedule to be repeated every hour. Constructing such a timetable is a complex combinatorial optimization problem. One O.R. problem solver, called CADANS, solves the network timetabling problem, and a second, STATIONS, finds the detailed routes for the trains through the different stations. A third, ROSA, handles rolling stock circulation, using ILOG CPLEX and ILOG OPL Development Studio. Yet another, TURNI, schedules crews.

2007 showed an all-time record in number of passengers. Lines with the largest timetable improvements saw an increase in passenger demand of 10-15%. The percentage of trains arriving within 3 minutes of the scheduled time increased from 84.8 % in 2006 to 87.0 % in 2007, which is again an all-time high record. Surveys showed public opinion changed radically from negative to positive. The more efficient resource schedules and the increased number of passengers already resulted in an annual additional profit of 40 million Euros ($60 million). It is expected that this will increase to 70 million Euros ($105 million) in coming years. Finally, a further increase in railway transport on the current network is possible, which would reduce road congestion and pollution from greenhouse gases.

More information can be found in this success story on the ILOG web site. We congratulate Netherlands Railways and their Operations Research collaborators (University of Padua, Erasmus University, CWI, and Safiro Software Solutions BV) on their great accomplishment.

Dan Selman at EclipseCon

Daryl Pereira — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:54:49 +0000

EclipseCon 2008, the fifth annual Eclipse community conference, recently took place in California. ILOG's Daniel Selman was there, and in his own inimitable style covered the following sessions:

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What’s new in JRules 6.7

Daryl Pereira — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:26:08 +0000

JRules 6.7 builds on the industry-leading JRules 6 BRMS. There’s more control and flexibility for business users, and expanded support for IT platform infrastructure.

This recorded presentation covers what’s new in JRules 6.7:

Features
Benefits
In-depth product demonstration

Find out why JRules 6.7 is the best solution for managing decision change, complexity, and compliance in your mission-critical business systems.

More JRules information:

JRules product pages
Ready to test drive? Download the JRules Trial now