PARIS, Nov. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), today announced that Essilor International, the world leader in ophthalmic optical products, has selected ILOG Rules for .NET(TM), a key offering in ILOG's Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, as a key part of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative that will provide a single platform for all business and financial applications deployed by Essilor across Europe. One of the first applications to be put in production will use ILOG Rules for .NET to streamline the management of customer contracts. This application will enable Essilor sales managers to improve time-to-market for new pricing policies, while ensuring that company policies better address local market requirements and regional market growth objectives and remain compliant with Essilor's corporate policies.

Essilor offers a wide range of lenses under the flagship Varilux(R), Crizal(R), Airwear(R) and Essilor(R) brands to correct myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia and astigmatism. The company operates worldwide through 16 production sites, 215 lens finishing laboratories and local distribution networks. Managing customers' contracts and pricing policies in an efficient way is therefore critical to Essilor business success.

Before selecting ILOG Rules for .NET, Essilor had home-grown systems in place to manage their customers' contracts and related pricing policies. When the company decided to allow its regional sales managers to set up their own pricing and promotions in response to market trends, they found their existing systems would not allow it. Business rules were hard-coded in these systems and could not be easily accessed, meaning that creating and launching new pricing policies was a manual process that could take weeks or months to complete, making it impossible for local regions to customize promotions due to the large-scale effort involved. Essilor decided a BRMS that fits with their Microsoft .NET platform would be a solution.

Using ILOG Rules for .NET, all of Essilor's pricing policies and customer contracts affecting each region can be managed in a single platform. They can now be accessed and changed as often as necessary, providing greater business agility and speeding time-to-market for the launch of new offers. Essilor can also compute annual customer incentives more quickly and with fewer errors, as well as track incentive payments using the rule traceability features in ILOG Rules for .NET. Other benefits include the creation of a repository of reusable contract templates.

"After a first successful experience with ILOG JRules for our margin analysis application, we considered that to reach our goal we needed to implement a flexible sales management policy. The best solution was to integrate our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system with Rules for .NET," said Philippe Marchan, CFM Project Director at Essilor.

In addition to the pricing initiative, Essilor plans to use ILOG Rules for .NET for additional projects such as a product routing application that determines which lab can most efficiently produce each customer order based on resource availability, skills, delays and costs.

ILOG Rules for .NET was the first product in its category to leverage Microsoft Office(R) products, including Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, as tools for developing and managing business rule management applications. Now, with just knowledge of these applications, business users can save time creating and editing business policies in the familiar desktop environment.

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make it the industry's leading provider of business rule software. 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.

About ILOG

ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,500 global corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS) and optimization and visualization software components to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 740 people worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.ilog.com/ .

NOTE: ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG Rules for .NET and JRules are trademarks of ILOG. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT: media, Monika Raj of ILOG, +1-650-567-8128, or mraj@ilog.com

Web site: http://www.ilog.com/