ILOG's BRMS Is Among the First Business Applications Selected to Showcase MS Office 2007: ILOG today announced that an upcoming release of one of its award-winning business rule management systems (BRMS) will support the new Microsoft Office 2007, enabling collaboration between IT and business users for business rule management on the .NET platform. The Company also today announced that Microsoft has selected its ILOG Rules for .NET product to be among the first business applications to showcase the new Office 2007 capabilities. The announcement was made today to complement Microsoft's worldwide Office 2007 Business Value Launch today. In business software, business rules are often embedded and custom-coded and must be re-written when business changes. A BRMS replaces these hard-coded rules with a centralized business rules management system that enables easy access, modifications and deployment of these rules. IDC Group Vice President, Stephen Hendrick, wrote in a recent report (IDC #203627), "A BRMS centralizes the definition, discovery, storage, and submission of the vast quantity of rules used in business operations to provide organizations with greater automation, more responsiveness to change, and less expensive distribution and maintenance of their business activities. Because business rules are a part of every business process in every organizational function, it is far more cost effective to manage them with systems intended specifically for that purpose rather than try to do it manually." These benefits are key to the technology's mainstream appeal with IT departments. ILOG's BRMS for the .NET platform, ILOG Rules for .NET, has provided business rule management capabilities for MS Office users since 2004, allowing non-technical business experts to access, edit and collaborate to manage their business policies from the familiar interface of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents. These documents can then be easily shared with IT professionals through Microsoft SharePoint Services. Users of the upcoming release of Rules for .NET, available next year, will derive many benefits from the new version of Office 2007. The new architecture has made the integration between Rules for .NET and the .NET platform tighter for an even better user experience when editing rules in Microsoft Word or Excel documents. ILOG customers will also benefit from menu enhancements in Office 2007, including a new "Rules" tab in the Ribbon, which has replaced menus and toolbars in the new release of Office, allowing business users to get to their rules-related content with fewer mouse clicks. Users will also benefit from built-in workflows for document-routing and enhanced Word editing tools available in Office 2007 for editing business rules inside documents. "At ILOG, we are committed to ensuring that our customers benefit from the latest technology innovations. The new version of Visual Studio Tools for Office allows us to leverage the Office environment to enhance our BRMS offering," said ILOG Chief Product Officer Jean Francois Abramatic. "We expect further benefits for our customers in the Open XML format with better data exchange between our products and other enterprise software applications." "By enabling business rule management and application development using familiar Microsoft Office with its Rules for .NET product, ILOG has raised the bar in ease-of-use for enterprises worldwide that are increasingly relying on a BRMS to help improve business response times to regulations, customer demands and competitive threats," said Thomas Defaye, director of Development and Partnerships, Microsoft. "We believe ILOG's seamless integration with Office 2007 will bring a lot of value to our customers who need to modify business rules in their organizations to respond to these challenges." A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make it the industry's leading provider of business rule management system software. Gartner positioned ILOG in the leader's quadrant of Gartner's 2005 Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines, while Forrester Research has recognized ILOG as a business rule platform market leader, including the leader in business rule platforms for Java. Customers of ILOG's award-winning BRMS products include eBay, Equifax, Grupo Santander, Harrah's Entertainment, Visa, Vodafone, Zurich, and many other leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide. ILOG's business rule management system (BRMS) product line includes ILOG JRules, ILOG Rules for .NET and ILOG Rules (C++).