IBM has announced the completion of its approximately $340 million tender offer for the shares of ILOG. The tender offer, announced July 28, 2008, was finalized after IBM acquired all outstanding stock in ILOG and satisfied the other conditions of the offer.
Headquartered in Paris, ILOG (NASDAQ: ILOG) (PARIS: ILO) (ISIN: FR0004042364) has more than 2,500 customers, 850 employees and operations in 30 countries around the world. The ILOG business rule management system (BRMS), optimization, visualization, and supply chain management (SCM) portfolios will build upon IBM software and business process management (BPM) leadership across a broad range of applications and environments, the company says.
ILOG technology will add significant capability across IBM's software platform and the addition of BRMS will provide another dimension of leadership for the IBM BPM portfolio, the company says. This includes improved rules and business optimization for WebSphere and information management offerings, better visualization for WebSphere, Lotus and Tivoli products and solutions, as well as enhanced optimization and efficient supply chain management assets for planning and scheduling within a service oriented architecture (SOA).
The ILOG BRMS products help businesses increase the agility of their decision making by letting them adapt and respond dynamically. Based on applied mathematics and computer science, the ILOG optimization products allow enterprises to cope with many operating constraints. The software enables them to transform business objectives, resources and operational constraints into best possible action plans and schedules to enhance service, revenue and profits.
ILOG Visualization enhances an organization's collaboration, role-based, and decision-making capabilities by building interactive user interfaces through diagrams, maps, schedules, charts and editors. ILOG supply chain management solutions, which include network design, inventory optimization, production planning and scheduling, provide an opportunity for leaner manufacturing and green supply chain management.
ILOG offers tools and technologies for business managers, analysts, architects and developers to use as they analyze, plan, track and improve business processes. Today, hundreds of large enterprises use ILOG technologies to automate the allocation of scarce resources and to build smart interfaces into their business processes. Additionally, scientists and mathematicians from hundreds of universities use ILOG products for advanced research, design, and analysis.
For example, a business rule might be applied to elevate a premier customer to the front of a phone queue as part of a customer service process. ILOG's BRMS provides users with tools that allow greater control over the criteria that determine how and when to route those premier customers. This allows businesses to accelerate the process of initiating policy changes that may be driven by market trends or competitive activity to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained. The ease of business rule management helps reduce costs while customer satisfaction and retention translates into increased revenue.
Aviva Canada Inc., a leading property and casualty insurance group, selected ILOG JRules, a key offering in the ILOG business rule management system (BRMS) product line, for use in its common service delivery platform. Based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that also includes IBM WebSphere and IBM's Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), the platform will help Aviva automate its underwriting process for personal lines and auto, reducing the carrier's time-to-market to incorporate new or updated business policies. Aviva can implement rule changes in days or real time.
"We selected ILOG JRules because of its ease-of-use, advanced rule management capabilities and tight integration in a service oriented architecture," said Michael Lin, vice president e-commerce, Aviva. "Since business rules are a fundamental part of insurance processes, ILOG's track record as a BRMS provider and the support we received were also deciding factors for us."
ILOG will become part of the IBM WebSphere software portfolio. Consistent with IBM's software strategy, ILOG clients' and partners' investments in existing IBM and ILOG technologies will be preserved, allowing customers to take advantage of the broader set of capabilities without the need to replace existing systems.
"As a leader in business rules, optimization, visualization and supply chain management software, we are pleased to welcome the ILOG customers and the ILOG employees to the WebSphere family," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software. "The acquisition of ILOG is an important element within our overall SOA strategy and the key addition of the ILOG BRMS to IBM's BPM portfolio will help IBM clients to become more dynamic. ILOG brings significant new capabilities to IBM that will provide agile, flexible applications for real-time response and confident decision-making."
The acquisition of ILOG will strengthen IBM's business process management (BPM) and SOA position by providing customers a broad set of rule management tools for information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform, including IBM's leading WebSphere application development and management platform. Many of the ILOG products will also become part of IBM's Industry Frameworks, which are integrated solutions that support industry specific business and technology standards.
Clients who use role based business spaces will now be able to take advantage of the visualization capabilities of ILOG to help improve the variety and sophistication of their views. In addition to diagramming and charting, these visualizations can be used by business space to provide more robust web-based BPM capabilities such as process modeling.
With more than 7,000 client engagements worldwide, IBM is a worldwide leader in SOA and BPM. This leadership is further illustrated by a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, more than 150 universities incorporating IBM's SOA and BPM curricula, and more than 6,000 IBM Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions, and practices.
For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/soa
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