Expanding the strategic relationship between ILOG and Microsoft Corp., ILOG joins an industry-leading group of ISV partners with a specific focus on creating solutions that further enhance business process management (BPM) on the Microsoft platform.

The Microsoft Business Process Alliance was established to propel mainstream adoption of BPM by promoting a powerful set of end-to-end solutions for automating Business Processes. ILOG and Microsoft will collaborate to upgrade, expand and promote the integration ILOG Rules for .NET(R) ILOG's BRMS for the .NET platform, with Microsoft desktop and enterprise products, including the 2007 Microsoft Office system, BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Windows SharePoint Services, Visual Studio, .NET 3.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation.

Business rule technologies are considered essential to BPM systems (BPMS) because they extend the flexibility and agility BPM brings to process management by making complex decisions in the processes transparent, and therefore manageable, to users. According to leading IT research firm, Gartner, in the report "A Business Rule Market Checkup," November 6, 2007 by David McCoy and Eric Deitert, "By definition a BPMS must include rules technologies."

With ILOG Rules for .NET, customers can author and manage the business rules that define business decisions, and can integrate the resulting decision services into their business applications using products familiar to end users such as the Microsoft Office system, integrating with developer technologies such as Visual Studio, .NET 3.0, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows Communication Foundation, and deployment on server products such as BizTalk Server 2006 R2. This synergy between ILOG's BRMS and Microsoft desktop and enterprise technologies, significantly increases ease-of-use and improves time-to-market for enterprises worldwide that are facing faster business cycles and aging software architectures that can't accommodate change quickly enough.

"Through the Business Process Alliance, customers benefit from a powerful set of end-to-end tools for automating and optimizing their business processes, without custom integration," said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. "ILOG is a significant asset to the Microsoft Business Process Alliance by providing enhanced business rules management, which delivers on our customers' needs."