JT on EDM

Sodexo provides all sorts of services around food and facilities management. Labor is the number one cost for Sodexo. Each of their businesses, and they have businesses in 7,000 locations, is run somewhat separately. Most staff are hourly, many are unionized and each State has different rules. Tracking and managing hours worked is critical to [...]

Gerhard Hausmann presented on Barmenia and their use of business rules to improve customer experience. Barmenia is a private health / life insurance company in Germany with more than 2M contracts and 1.5Bn Euros in premiums. Been in business since 1904 and still have contracts that date back to the last century. In Germany there [...]

Frank DiGiovanni of Group RCI (a vacation exchange and vacation rental company, part of Wyndham Worldwide) presented on their journey  – a legacy modernization using ILOG Rules. Frank  identified SOA, legacy migration from mainframe to SOA and how business rules complements these as his key topics. Group RCI’s core problem was threefold:

Members: had to call [...]

Steve DeMuth presented on the ILOG BRMS roadmap. The roadmap is driven by ILOG’s vision of rules as a way to solve a class of problems, the need to integrate and partner with IBM (WebSphere,System Z), integration points and real use cases. The vision:

Businesses live and die on the quality of their decisions and their [...]

Nicolas Robbe came next to give some updates on the product roadmaps. To be honest what he mostly did was summarize recent developments – nothing really about futures.
First he talked about optimization and CPLEX’s 20 year history. With CPLEX 11 they feel they can solve 70% of the very hardest optimization problems – way up [...]

Pierre Haren started up the keynotes with some personal comments about the excitement of being part of IBM, seeing more customers at DIALOG and hearing stories from customers about what they are doing with ILOG products. He is clearly enthused by the opportunity to reach more companies by being part of IBM than they ever [...]

On now to the roadmap, at least at a high level.
Right now there is the normal post-acquisition “blue wash” going on and by Q2 will deliver IBM versions of all ILOG’s products and, obviously IBM’s global sales force and Global Services are being spun up. The core of the roadmap is to move the BRMS [...]

Getting started at DIALOG I got to spend some time with Tom Rosamilia GM of WebSphere, Sandy Carter and Pierre Haren, CEO of ILOG discussing the ILOG acquisition by IBM.
Tom went first by pointing out that the acquisition seemed like a good idea when it was announced and since then the Smarter Planet initiatives and [...]

Last post in my series as I am off to DIALOG next week and will get a chance to meet some of the IBM folks and chat about their plans. Here, then, are some quickie ideas for ways IBM could use rules besides the ones I mentioned already:

Modernizing Legacy
IBM customers have LOTS of legacy systems. [...]

One of IBM’s big initiatives is their focus on a smarter planet. One of the ways IBM could really use ILOG is to make the construction of smarter systems (or smart (enough) systems) easier and faster. To illustrate what I mean I took some quotes from Sam Palmisano’s Smarter Planet speech
our world is becoming instrumented

Absolutely [...]