webMethods to Enhance webMethods Fabric With Rule Management Component From Fair Isaac

webMethods, Inc., a leading business integration and optimization software company, today announced a strategic partnership and licensing agreement with Fair Isaac Corporation, a leading provider of analytics and decision technology. Under the terms of the agreement, webMethods will incorporate components of Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor as the embedded rules engine standard for future editions of webMethods Fabric™, the company's flagship solution for process-based, service- oriented total business integration. The announcement was made in conjunction with Integration World 2005, the webMethods user conference being held this week in Atlanta.

The availability of an embedded business rules engine within upcoming versions of webMethods Fabric is designed to further enhance the significant value offered by the product suite's existing business process management (BPM) and business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities. Specifically, it will provide business users with added versatility and ease-of-use in the way in which business rules, policies and strategies are created, managed and changed within the webMethods Fabric operating environment. This reinforces webMethods Fabric's position as the premier platform for optimizing all enterprise business processes.

"Enterprises across numerous industries choose webMethods Fabric as their platform for total business integration due to its ability to address the full gamut of their business process requirements," said Marc Breissinger, vice president and chief architect, webMethods, Inc. "The ability to define, implement and manage the business rules associated with these business processes plays a significant role in enhancing these efforts. With our commitment to provide best-in-class technologies that deliver enhanced business agility and predictability, we see Fair Isaac — with its market leadership and core competency in the area of business rules management — as the obvious strategic partner for delivering this additional value to our customers."

A key benefit of the partnership is the tremendous control that both webMethods Fabric and Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor place in the hands of line-of- business users. By offering best-in-class rules management as a component of webMethods Fabric, business users will be able to more readily adapt and more consistently apply external business rules to their business processes — making on-the-fly changes to business processes and seeing their impact immediately on a variety of modeled scenarios — without concern for the underlying programming requirements. The availability of Blaze Advisor as a fully-integrated component of webMethods Fabric's service-oriented architecture ultimately means that business rules can now be applied to specific business processes with greater speed, precision and ease, while also reducing the development burden on IT. This allows enterprises to achieve the maximum business benefit from deploying these critical technologies while simultaneously reducing their total cost of ownership.

webMethods' selection of Fair Isaac was a result of a competitive review that looked for an off-the-shelf rules solution that would allow customers to implement best practices in rules management and move away from proprietary, acquired and homegrown solutions system logic. Fair Isaac's recognized technology leadership, market leader status and financial stability, coupled with Blaze Advisor's flexibility, robustness and completeness complements webMethods Fabric and webMethods' mission to support business integration at the process level. Blaze Advisor is part of Fair Isaac's enterprise decision management technology suite, which combines data analytics, modeling and policy-level control to let companies define and manage their automated business systems for improved efficiency and greater profitability.

"As enterprises increasingly adopt a process-centric approach to IT, webMethods Fabric has emerged as a leading platform for not only enabling this transition, but also for accelerating the realization of strategic business benefits from integration," said Carole-Ann Matignon, vice president of product management, enterprise decision management, at Fair Isaac. "By delivering Blaze Advisor via the service-oriented architecture enabled by webMethods Fabric, users can more easily apply and adapt the business logic governing their key enterprise business processes. This heightened level of flexibility underlies one of the principal benefits of Blaze Advisor, which is its ability to routinely and consistently apply business rules to a variety of scenarios."