PARIS — ILOG (ILOG; Nouveau Marche France) the world’s leading
supplier of Java and C++ software components, today announced the launch of
a campaign to support e-government projects with advanced technology, based
on the successful implementations within state and federal government
systems in France, Hong Kong, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and recently the
United Kingdom and United States.
“Governments around the world are turning to high-tech solutions to fulfill
the growing public demand for accessibility, as well as to achieve greater
efficiency and reduce spending,” explained Jean-Michel Issakidis, ILOG
Government Marketing Director. “Accessibility is what e-government is all
about, and ILOG’s best-of-breed e-business technology is suited to extend
the benefits of the information revolution to online services for
individuals, communities and businesses that deal with local, state and
federal governments.”
Confirming this position, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has set a 2005
deadline for all public services in the United Kingdom to be accessible
online. President George W. Bush, in his 2002 budget report, emphasized that
“the US Department of Defense and other government agencies must review
opportunities to expand the use of commercial practices and products that
will facilitate the modernization of military forcesto lower costs and
utilize market-based solutions wherever possible…”
Spain’s Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, has launched the INFO XXI
development program, based on the e-Europe initiative approved by the
European Council meeting of Lisbon March 2000. This program calls for the
implementation of more than three hundred actions and projects between
2001-2003 to stimulate high-tech development in Spain. Several government
contractors, such as INDRA Sistemas, who utilize ILOG technology in its
e-government workflow package, have already begun preparation for INFO XXI
initiatives.
Two of the products in ILOG’s e-government support portfolio are ILOG JRules
and JViews. The first, a highly scalable, Java-based business rule engine,
can fire more than 10,000 parameters per second, enabling it to provide full
personalization and data correlation to web applications supporting
thousands of simultaneous connections. In the United Kingdom, Capita is
applying ILOG JRules for an authentication and certification system
developed for the Criminal Record Bureau.
The second product, ILOG JViews, is a visualization tool supporting advanced
web technologies, including DHTML and EJBs, for online modeling and
monitoring. Developers generally save 80% in programming time with JViews,
while end users commend the intuitive displays and outstanding performance.
ILOG JViews was critical to the French Governments cartographic information
system developed by Eurocis.
“Governments are increasingly using Internet technologies to track end-user
information and link legacy systems. Integrating these technologies across
several functions increases the value of self-service and the two-way flow
of information,” said Issakidis. “This takes robust, flexible technology
able to build, model and manage advanced workflow-based applications. ILOG
JViews and ILOG JRules enable organizations to rapidly model and automate
complex internal processes across the web as well as front- and back-office
systems. They also provide the ability to modify the business rules
governing those processes on the fly.”
Rounding out the high-tech software supporting e-government is the
Optimization Suite, ILOG’s most popular product line, which allows
developers to create powerful solutions for resource optimization,
scheduling, logistics, planning and configuration. The United States’
Internal Revenue Service has already integrated the ILOG Optimization
technology into their workforce scheduling system, as has the Lord
Chancellors Department of the United Kingdom.
Jean-Michel Issakidis points out that, “The citizen-as-customer approach to
e-government involves improving operations to better fulfill needs. Most of
the benefits of e-government will be lost, however, if Internet applications
are only used as front-end showcases.
They should also support interaction,
enabling customers to access resources and work with agencies. With ILOG
optimization an agency can easily address the complexity of high-level
operation planning, because of the unique technologies that seamlessly blend
mathematical programming and constraint programming together, for both long-
and short-term planning solutions. They also enable decision-making for
applying resources.”
Part of ILOG’s e-government campaign includes participation in the May 10th
Electronic Public Information 2001 conference in West Midlands, UK. This
year’s event, organized by the Society of Public Information Networks
(SPIN), whose members include local authorities, health agencies, libraries,
museums, central government departments, voluntary organizations and private
sector companies, comes at a time when the interest of e-government is at a
record high.
ILOG has seven offices around the world, including France, California and Virginia.
