Hotwire Deploys ILOG JRules To Create Flexible Product Pricing System

ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced that Hotwire®, a leading discount travel site, is using ILOG JRules™, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) product line, to support its product pricing system. ILOG JRules enables Hotwire to expand revenue opportunities and improve business response times.

Hotwire helps top travel suppliers fill unsold airline seats, hotel rooms and rental cars, by selling inventory to price-conscious travelers at deeply discounted prices. The discount travel site's pricing structure is managed by a set of business policies or "rules," which were previously managed in a database system. By liberating the rules from database systems and centralizing them in ILOG JRules, Hotwire can access and modify pricing more quickly, while minimizing the need for new hardware purchases. As Hotwire extends its product portfolio, the BRMS will provide the scalability required to support the increasing number of rules, while ensuring Hotwire’s business analysts can express more complex rules using natural language.

“Hotwire has seen significant improvements in hardware scalability with ILOG JRules, enabling us to deploy increasingly complex pricing rules to support new products without much incremental investment,” said Vikas Sabnani, Senior Manager of Revenue Management for Hotwire. “We’ve reduced time to market for new features, helping drive higher profitability and enhancing the consumer experience.”

ILOG JRules was deployed in just four months by Hotwire’s in-house software developers and architects and is maintained jointly by the company’s IT and revenue management departments.

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the industry’s leading business rule software. Recently, Gartner Dataquest ranked ILOG the market share leader of the worldwide business rule engine software market for 2004, and Gartner positioned ILOG in the leader’s quadrant of Gartner’s 2005 Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines. The company has also been twice-named the BRMS market leader by IT research firm IDC. Customers of the award-winning ILOG JRules 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), optimization and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. The BRMS market share leader, ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 730 people worldwide.

ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.