DIALOG

Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways: Start small and in a well known area to prove out the technology but [...]

I took some notes from an interesting panel on governance and change control. Panels are always tough to blog so this is a summary of my takeaways not a record of the panel: Executive sponsorship and active evangelism are key Build expertise – centers of excellence – within the groups that are managing rules Start [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog  WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!. Business Mash-ups Business Rules Middleware-as-a-Service Rainmaker Extreme Scale WAS.NEXT Restful – Agile DataPower-lution POWERful Middleware Industry-savvy Middleware He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. [...]

I am going to be attending ILOG’s DIALOG ’09 user group next month and I thought I would build up to it by posting my thoughts on some of the opportunities IBM has as it integrates ILOG’s technology into its product portfolio. Today is the first one in this series – the opportunity to use [...]

ILOG today announced a Scorecard modeler as an add-on for ILOG JRules ® (which I first saw at DIALOG). As their press release says, this add-in allows customers to “incorporate statistical scorecard models directly into decision services” – a key tenet of enterprise decision mangement or EDM. ILOG is targeting financial institutions clearly but apparently [...]

While attending DIALOG I had a chance to have lunch with Sandy Carter of IBM and Pierre Haren of ILOG. There was a lot of interesting discussion but two key themes caught my attention – business v IT drivers and reuse. Sandy discussed how top-down SOA being driven by BPM and has an executive focus, [...]

Last session of the day was from Rodolfo Viola of Swiss Medical Argentina on Breakthrough in Claims Excellence Management. Claims is, of course, a prime target for rules-based automation so I was excited to hear how an organization outside of North America/Europe was handling it. Swiss Medical is a privately owned company founded as a [...]

My next session was on Flexibility, Scalability and High Performance with James Reid of Equifax. The application being discussed is the Equifax InterConnect Platform (part of their risk solutions, described here), a hosted SaaS solution that handles risk-based decisioning, especially credit risk. InterConnect is their decisioning platform for credit and lending and is designed to [...]

I missed the customer panel with Travelocity, Equifax, Deloitte Consulting and Bank of America but hopefully the DIABLOGgers got that one too (they did, check here). Next up is Daryl Plummer of Gartner talking about Dynamic BPM—Where SOA, Rules, Processes and Events Come Together.  Daryl started with a great plug for my book and then got [...]