Vodafone Spain Customer Loyalty Programs Get a Boost From ILOG JRules

New JRules-based System Will Enable Online Promotions For the First Time

MADRID – November 8, 2005 – ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), a leading supplier of enterprise-class software components and services, today announced that Vodafone Spain, the Spain subsidiary of one of Europe’s leading wireless service providers has selected ILOG JRules™ a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, to create a new centralized promotions platform for its 10 million customers in Spain. Using ILOG JRules, Vodafone Spain expects to enhance its customer acquisition and customer loyalty programs and boost sales during traditionally slow periods by rapidly introducing new promotions.

In addition to allowing Vodafone to offer online promotions for the first time, a new rules-based promotions system called NPPI (New Platform of Integrated Promotions) will reduce the time-to-market of new promotions and will facilitate the creation of new and innovative promotions.

In the extremely competitive mobile phone market, a service provider’s primary concern is “churn management,” i.e. reducing the number of customers that move to other carriers. In Spain, Vodafone relies heavily on promotions to support both new customer growth and customer loyalty management programs to reduce churn. These programs rely on incentives for new subscribers as well as rewards for current customers.

Prior to deploying the new rule-based NPPI, the management of promotions at Vodafone Spain was a cumbersome and time-consuming task since promotions were hard-coded into different customer relationship management (CRM) and billing systems. New promotions and changes to existing promotions required code development to create or modify eligibility rules. Additional coding was then required to ensure the changes were consistent across the different systems. Vodafone Spain’s marketing staff had to rely on IT developers to implement new promotions and changes, which resulted in long deployment cycles.

ILOG JRules will allow business policies that map to different promotions to be centralized and managed in a single platform. The advanced business rule management features, including the JRules repository, will give Vodafone Spain’s marketing teams the tools to create or update promotions themselves, and group the related business policies into easy-to-understand decision tables, as well as monitor the response to promotions in real-time and make any necessary adjustments. Following a short testing and debugging phase, new promotions can go into production within days instead of weeks, allowing Vodafone to be more competitive with its promotions. In addition, because ILOG JRules can process, in real time, the numerous events triggering promotions, Vodafone Spain can, for the first time, offer online promotions and notify its customers instantly of available rewards. In addition, ILOG JRules can enable the delivery of new types of promotions, such as contests, home-delivered gifts, or special “keys” for access to restricted sites.

“Improving our customer loyalty and customer acquisition programs were critical business objectives at Vodafone Spain,” said Jose Ignacio Nogués, IT Manager, Product, Pricing and Billing, Vodafone Spain. “ILOG JRules brings unprecedented flexibility to our promotions management by giving our marketing experts greater control over their promotions for a faster business response time to competitive pressures, while improving our operational efficiency through faster time-to-market and consistency in policies and promotions across multiple systems and channels.”

In Germany, Vodafone D2 is successfully using ILOG’s BRMS as part of its Realtime Rating Solution for billing applications.

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the industry’s leading business rule software. For the third year in a row, ILOG has been posititioned in the leader quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines and ILOG has twice been named the BRMS market leader by IT research firm IDC. ILOG’s BRMS customers include eBay, Freddie Mac, Sabre, Zurich American 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 690 people worldwide. For more information, please visit www.ilog.com .

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