Monday morning here at DIALOG and the keynotes are up next. The show has about 300 attendees, about half customers, representing about 18 countries. First on is Pierre Haren, Chairman and CEO of ILOG. Pierre gave a quick overview of 20 years of ILOG history and he then focused on ILOG’s mission:

Make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity

I like this focus on decisions and, of course, think that technology like business rules are ideal for managing change and complexity. Geographically ILOG balances US and Europe at about 45% each and 9% from Asia. As a product company most of their revenue comes from licenses and maintenance. Rules is the largest, optimization second and visualization fourth. Pierre discussed their core technologies:

• BRMS automating policies and policy-driven decisions
• ODMS (Optimization Decision Management System) for planning and scheduling - more and more a complete decisioning platform not just a solver
• Visualization to aid in understanding of complex systems - Adobe, for instance, just released a version of Flex that uses Elixir from ILOG (information here)

In addition they have built custom solutions (alone and with partners), frameworks (for lending and pricing) and Supply Chain applications (network design, fab automation).

Pierre spent some time discussing customers. The fab automation system for IBM’s newest fab, uses all the technologies - data is passed in every few minutes, rules clean and organize the data and feed into an optimization engine and the results are then cleaned by more rules developed by fab engineers and displayed using the visualization tool. Constant rescheduling to smooth out changes and problems for increasing throughput. Another example is the Singapore container port who use the technology to manage cranes etc and to move from 5-high stacks of containers to 9 high ones. Rules and optimization are used to make sure that the containers are stacked in an optimal order. This has made Singapore the busiest port thanks to the trans-shipment business they have - a benefit of being the best managers of the decisions around storing containers for faster access. He also referred to this week’s BusinessWeek which has a table of best companies for customer service. USAA, another ILOG customer, came top.

Don’t forget you can find more posts through the DIABLOG.