Foo Jong Tong is General Manager of ILOG Asia Pacific
Mr Foo Jong Tong is the General Manager, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), at ILOG (S) PTE LTD. He holds a double degree in Mathematics (Majors in Computer Science and Statistics) and Computer Science (Honors) from the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Mr Foo has more than thirteen years of experience in the information technology industry. For the first six years of his career, he has been actively involved in the real-time Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (C3I) business for commerce and defense. Mr Foo has also spent two years in Sweden working as a Software Specialist and later as Project Leader/Manager for one of Europe’s largest defense contractor. He has also been successful in Sales to major government accounts.
Over at ILOG, Mr Foo started the marketing arm for ILOG Asia Pacific and later went on to head both the Sales and Marketing arms. He was also responsible for Alliances and Emerging Markets in Asia Pacific. Mr Foo is currently the General Manager of ILOG Singapore as well as a member (representing Asia Pacific) of a management team under the Industrial Systems Division Business Unit in ILOG that has world-wide responsibility for Transportation, Defense, Finance, Banking and other vertical industries.
Business rules represent the core business logic of an organization - they guide, control, and manage the basic business processes. Business Rules are almost synonymous with ILOG. When talking about Business Rules you cannot afford to not talk about ILOG. Recently Dilip Thomas chatted up with Foo Jong Tong, General Manager of ILOG Asia Pacific, to find out more about ILOG’s product lines, its business interests in Asia, and the road ahead.
Can you elucidate in a bit about ILOG's three product lines, some example applications that use each of them, and the potential benefits that applications can draw from ILOG products?
ILOG provides 3 product lines; business rule managemet system (BRMS), optimization, and visualization.
BRMS The fastest growing amongst the 3 products is currently BRMS, and ILOG is the technology leader of BRMS. Business rules in an organization can be anything that is used to run the organization – ranging from corporate policies, regulatory authorizations, to the logic and procedures found in programming code that comprise corporate or departmental applications. No matter how simple or complex, being able to create, maintain, update and follow the business rules governing the operational processes of an organization is critical to its success.
What BRMS does it to allow non-technical business managers to implement business rules across the enterprise in real-time, with minimal assistance from IT professionals. Without BRMS, business rules in enterprises are hard-coded, making any changes to business rules and policies a time-consuming and tedious process.
Organizations which are policy intensive, such as financial institutions or government departments, find the BRMS most useful. For example, the Industrial Bank of Korea is using ILOG JRules to help bank tellers, loan officers and other users to provide real-time product and service recommendations through the country’s “Bancassurance” System. Bancassurance was introduced via legislation to the South Korean financial market in 2003, allowing traditional banks to recommend and cross-sell insurance products to consumers. Though a new source of revenue for banks, selling insurance products poses significant barriers to entry for commercial banks, in part because the new offerings create highly complex combinations of financial and investment products, including life insurance, pension plans, travelers and fire policies and asset integration plans. Additionally, training and supporting the banking staff that have day to day contact with customers to make accurate and compelling recommendations also poses a significant challenge. Due to this increased complexity, Industrial Bank of Korea selected ILOG JRules to automate and streamline the business processes that drive its Bancassurance business.
Using ILOG JRules, the new system enables non-technical customer service bank employees to query customers using a series of questions that are mapped to proprietary business rules. The system then in turn produces automatically generated product and service recommendations. Furthermore, JRules reduces IT maintenance costs by providing business users with the ability to easily understand and edit business rules, alleviating the need to engage technical administrators.
Another interesting example of a BRMS user is a company which needs to change its rules constantly throughout the day, 24 x 7; eBay is a user of ILOG’s BRMS product, ILOG JRules™. On an average day, there are millions of items listed on eBay. People from all over the world buy and sell items in thousands of categories. New trends, new items, appear constantly and eBay has to identify and respond to them within a matter of minutes. To create a unified platform for managing the rules for buying and selling on this online market place, eBay standardized on ILOG JRules. This helps them to reduce the time required to make these changes, and they can do so quickly to keep up with the dynamic nature of their business. ILOG JRules central repository ensures that the same rules can be deployed across multiple sites in different countries quickly and consistently.
BRMS enables business users to maintain business logic without involving software professionals, by allowing portions of software code to be translated in the form of business rules which can then be read and manipulated by business users. By implementing ILOG BRMS across an enterprise, organizations can quickly address specific business process changes, and be proactive in response to changing business, regulatory and environmental conditions. ILOG business rule products can be embedded in Web, legacy and traditional back-office applications. It can work in Java, C#, Visual Basic, C++ or within Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio. Main products are ILOG JRules, ILOG Rules and ILOG Rules for .NET.
Optimization ILOG is the technology and market leader in optimization engines, which are used by major corporations and top ISVs within mission-critical applications that ensure the most efficient use of key resources like people, equipment, inventory and time. The ILOG Optimization Suite of products includes core engines -- ILOG Solver and ILOG CPLEX – and special-function modules and development environments.
One of the leading paper manufacturers in South Korea, Hansol Paper, uses ILOG optimization software to streamline its complex paper planning and production processes, including managing inventory requirements, resulting in a more efficient overall process that has reduced production time from 17 hours to less than two hours.
In addition to reducing production time, ILOG optimization software has improved strategic decision-making, shortened sales cycles and reduced waste and other costs associated with Hansol's production process.
Hansol is one of Asia’s leading newsprint paper manufacturers, producing 1.3 million tons of paper annually. In addition to being well established domestically, the company sells worldwide to organizations like the Los Angeles Times Corporation.
In order to utilize the least amount of paper and achieve maximum profit, Hansol created the “Hansol Integrated Production Scheduling System” based on a combination of three ILOG products - ILOG CPLEX®, ILOG Solver™ et ILOG Scheduler™. Hansol uses the combined solution to more effectively manage the planning and production of its highly complex manufacturing process, which involves multiple constraints that control factors such as determining the correct amount of pulp to purchase, minimizing the utilization of paper cutting machines, and reducing paper-type changes, preventing over-production or under-production during the cutting process, and decreasing the loss of paper during trimming.
ILOG optimization products are used in each phase of Hansol’s multi-stage production scheduling process, which includes a three month sales planning cycle, a one month production scheduling cycle, a cutting process that divides large jumbo-rolls of paper into several smaller optimally sized rolls, and finally a scheduling stage in which the smaller rolls are divided by sheet cutters in a process that considers load balance and other complex constraints.
Volkswagen (VW) is also another client of ILOG, and by using ILOG’s optimization product, allows them to offer customers more customized products and optimize production planning.
Prior to implementing ILOG solution, planning was a manual, labor-intensive process based on an inflexible, custom-built solution. The introduction of ILOG optimization into the planning system enabled VW to leverage its existing host client server and Oracle® server environment, extending the value of its legacy applications. ILOG CPLEX® optimization software has reduced the time it takes to build a schedule from an hour and-a-half to 15 minutes. Overall, only a half-day is now required to generate a production plan for the next day when a full day was necessary prior to using ILOG CPLEX. In the Volkswagen Navarra facility, in addition to using ILOG CPLEX for planning, Volkswagen relies on ILOG Solver™ for car sequencing, reducing the time needed to create a sequence from six hours when it was done manually to a couple of minutes currently. Time gains related to re-sequencing nicely complement the agility and flexibility acquired through the new planning system. ILOG’s real time optimization solution enables the car maker to meet both planning and sequencing specific time constraints and needs.
The new production planning system also enables the car maker to respond very swiftly to incidents, events and changing needs and to create new plans in real-time. This ensures that any unexpected event -- such as car engine delivery delays due to transporter’s strikes, production machine breakdown -- will have a minimal impact on the production. The car maker is able to re-plan very rapidly, taking into account the new constraints, ensuring the highest operational efficiency and maximizing resource utilization.
The Martorell car production site of SEAT is one of the most advanced facilities in Europe due to its logistics system as well as its production process’ flexibility. Currently, six different car models are being produced on its assembly lines.
Visualization To keep users informed in real time, and allow interaction through onscreen graphics, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) must display complex information in great detail. As GUI creation can amount to 50% of an application's total development time. ILOG Visualization products reduce the time, cost, and risk of developing applications, and dramatically extend their power, speed, and functionality.
ILOG supplies the industry's most comprehensive Java, .NET and C++ graphics libraries and components. They are ideal for developing data-aware, rich GUIs that offer high-performance, portability, and intuitive operation -- as well as connecting to databases and synchronizing. Main products are ILOG JViews, ILOG Views and ILOG JTGO.
The Japan Defense Agency (JDA) uses ILOG Views™ to enhance the user interface of the Command Control System of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF). The Command Control System is a “C4I” (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) system that coordinates three functions essential to defense: the delegation of forces (i.e., command and control); information management (i.e., communications and computers); and intelligence dissemination.
The Command Control System enables the GSDF, with more than 150 military stations across the country, to actively monitor command control of each of its units. In case of emergencies, the system rapidly conveys critical information to each unit’s military commanders, helping to facilitate supply logistics and mission planning. This highly complex, mission-critical information, now displayed using ILOG Views’ advanced graphics, will improve and accelerate the GSDF’s decision-making by allowing each unit’s commanders to swiftly and accurately understand the current situation and respond in a more efficient manner.
AP2000, the standard architecture for GSDF’s Command Control System, functions as an integrated framework that conveys emergency information to commanders. GSDF selected ILOG Views because it was the only tool able to make AP2000’s graphical elements display as quickly and readily as needed in order to meet the JDA’s requirements.
ILOG Views is compatible with Windows and UNIX, including Solaris and Linux, which enables a flexible architecture that is not dependent on vendor or architecture. As a result, GSDF succeeded in dramatically reducing the costs of both software development and application deployment. Because of the success in deploying ILOG Views as part of its GSDF operations, JDA plans to deploy the technology for Maritime Self-Defense Forces’ (MSDF) command control supporting system for maritime tactical forces.
ILOG JViews is also deployed by IBM to Provide Real-Time Transaction Process Mapping in IBM Tivoli Monitoring Solution.
The award-winning ILOG JViews will enable Tivoli customers to graphically visualize the flow of a transaction or group of transactions via sophisticated, realistic graphics - providing faster, more proactive problem determination for customers using IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance.
The monitoring product now provides the cutting edge capability to discover and display dynamically a J2EE transaction in a graphical fashion. The advanced visualization provided by JViews will give users the ability to recognize and isolate application performance problems through dynamic graphical models that map real-time transactions to the resources and components on which the applications run.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance delivers highly reliable transaction management for Web and enterprise infrastructure, helping users avoid critical performance problems and enabling smooth operations for customers and other end-users. Using ILOG JViews, Tivoli customers such as online retailers can monitor the flow and performance of either individual or groups of purchase transactions, from start to finish, determining the transaction response time and the source of delay. If a problem is found, ILOG JViews’ intuitive graphical modeling allows users to visually locate the component that is causing the delay in order to help them correct it immediately.
Closer to home, the SMRT bus services use multiple ILOG products in their dispatching systems in order to improve service for its 670,000 daily passengers. The ILOG-powered system has delivered efficiency and productivity improvements which have improved on-time performance to more than 95 percent for the fleet, which comprises 800 buses that cover more than 72 routes throughout Singapore.
ILOG’s business rule management system (BRMS), optimization and visualization software components were combined to create an integrated solution that performs bus and personnel dispatching as well as scheduling functions. Deployed as part of TIBS Depot Dispatching System (DDS) and Interchange Dispatching System (IDS), SMRT bus operators utilize ILOG Views™ to create an interactive display that allows them to visually track fleet movements, ILOG Solver ™ software to create optimized schedules, and ILOG BRMS to automate schedule dispatching. Prior to the ILOG deployment, SMRT used a combination of manual and automated systems to manage operations, a method which did not maximize personnel productivity and deliver the desired level of customer service.
In addition to efficiency gains, ILOG technology has enabled SMRT to be more agile and react quickly to unforeseen circumstances, such as the replacement of drivers and buses in the event of breakdowns, accidents, weather conditions, or sick leaves. ILOG software, installed last year throughout the transportation agency’s network of 20 interchanges and terminals and 4 depots, enables the company to better plan for, react to and manage contingencies by automating business processes involved in the operation of the fleet. The new fully automated system, part of SMRT’ information technology upgrade program, also frees SMRT dispatchers to focus on other operational duties and issues.
SMRT’ unique operational constraints included maintaining existing processes for procedural changes for reporting and scheduling of bus drivers and depot personnel. ILOG worked with the existing procedures and built an intelligent system that addressed these constraints, while accommodating real time changes to schedules and timetables.
What is ILOG's core focus in Asia? Clearly, the Rules Business is gaining traction in Europe with new IT projects while Americas is focusing on other product lines such as Visualization and Optimization. Is ILOG Asia focused on Enterprise BRMS, Vertical Solutions for supply chain, or software components?
Please allow me to clarify, in Americas, Europe and Asia, the business strategy is the same:
Establish Business Rule Management Systems as an Enterprise Software Platform. We are targeting to meet the demand for business rule technology as a key enabler of agility and business process automation across the corporate enterprise. Historically, business software applications have not been able to meet rapidly changing business environments. Silos of data, embedded application code and logic, legacy systems are each impediments to an organization’s ability to adapt to changing business conditions. We believe that our Business Rule Management System (“BRMS”) offering gives organizations the ability to “architect agility” into their software systems, allowing them to address the challenges of business change in a cost-effective way. BRMS also helps organizations centralize their business rules in a single or a few repositories, facilitating their maintenance and ensuring consistent deployment across the enterprise. Another key benefit of BRMS is that it can be implemented “on top” of existing software. Some of our customers use the BRMS to facilitate the transition from older software architectures, such as COBOL, to Java, without simultaneously having to perform a major overhaul of the underlying software infrastructure, by extracting hard-coded business logic and translating it into business rules that runs on top of the remaining legacy application.
Leverage BPM Software Trends. The push for greater process efficiency that drives the demand for Business Process Management (“BPM”) as well as the requirements for more corporate tracking and accountability have created opportunities for our products. Our BRMS and optimization components deliver real-time decisioning capabilities to the processes managed by the BPM systems and can empower business users to manage these decision rules, while our visualization components provide real-time supervision of the execution of these processes.
Pursue Alliances with Strategic Systems Integrators and Software Vendors. We are creating co-selling and co-marketing relationships for ILOG products in the BPM and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) areas to expand our market reach. This effort is accompanied by the partnerships that we are establishing with the leading systems integrators - such as Accenture, BearingPoint, Capgemini, PwC and IBM Global Services - and regional integrators. We are also partnering in co-selling activities with BPM vendors, such as FileNet.
Expand Revenues from Software Vendors. Our agreements with independent software vendors (ISVs) have consistently been a key part of our business strategy, because they enable the deployment of our software in business application markets that we would not otherwise be able to access directly. ISVs generate revenues for us when they embed one or more ILOG components into their products. As of June 30, 2004, we have entered into agreements with 420 ISV partners and in FY 2004 we generated approximately 31% of our revenues from this source. We also expect to further leverage our close relationships with some of these ISVs by creating co-marketing and co-selling opportunities for our BRMS products.
Increase Penetration of our Existing Customer Base. A key component of our strategy is expanding revenues from our existing customers. This is either achieved by selling additional licenses or a larger application license, or by helping our customers extend the use of our software to new projects, or by promoting an enterprise license to existing customers who have already successfully deployed one or several applications.
Develop our Service Revenue. We have developed service packages and a methodology for assessing, designing and implementing business rules projects to help our customers successfully use our software development tools. When used, this methodology generally results in building flexible and scalable rules architecture and in reducing the development effort. We believe the sale of these services should result in additional revenue, and greater customer satisfaction, which in turn could help us sell additional licenses to that customer.
How conducive a market is the APAC region for BRMS offerings? Are there any solid indicators for future success, notwithstanding ILOG's fortifying presence, of BRMS in APAC?
In Asia Pacific, companies work closely with global organizations, and need to comply with regulations around the world and at real-time. However, enterprises in Asia still face a mountain of manual processes, inconsistent and low data quality, combined with multiple sources of information and data coming from all directions.
There are also fragmented legacy systems, issues with poor integration data sharing, lack of flexibility and redundancy between applications.
Moreover, with fraud on the rise, it is crucial to have strong processes and coordinated approach, to improve operations agility and capability to adapt to changes in regulations and reduce fraud and error.
BRMS has a strong value proposition for Asia Pacific enterprises.
In addition, an announcement of collaboration between IDA (Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore) and ILOG for the first BRMS Center of Excellence in Asia is also an indication of the importance of BRMS and a catalyst to the growth of BRMS adoption in this region. The first pilot project to be developed by e-Tek, using BRMS solutions, will develop a seamless straight-through-processing solution, to facilitate insurance claims between insurance companies and healthcare service providers.
In this instance, BRMS will complement web services in providing uninterrupted information exchange and transactions, even with frequent changes to rules and policies by the insurance companies and health service providers. This will enable business rules to be updated rapidly, and similarly bring greater convenience to patients as insurance claims can b processed faster. This solution will soon be deployed at Alexandra hospital in Singapore, to create a hassle-free hospital for its patients.
Where is ILOG headquartered in Asia? Are there dedicated developer teams in Asia that work on all three ILOG product lines? What is ILOG's Asia Headcount and is it poised to increase in 2005?
ILOG is headquartered in Singapore. We have offices in Australia, China and Japan. We also have dedicated business partners in some countries where we have no direct presence. In Asia Pacific, we have dedicated Technical Account Managers, Consultants and Hotline Support to service our clients in all three product lines.
Currently we have 65 people in Asia Pacific including Japan and we are poised to increase our headcount in 2005.
A look at the financials suggests that ILOG's revenue from Asia accounts for 8% of ILOG's global revenue. This figure is almost a sixth of the revenues generated by Americas. Further, in Q2 2005, no growth is reported from Asia. Is it 'Focus Asia' for ILOG in the coming quarters?
Asia Pacific is a very diverse market in terms of geography, language, culture and level of IT maturity. At the current stage of our operations in Asia Pacific, our aim is to ensure all customers and business partners will have very positive experience with our technology as well as our people. We would like to see successful deployment of every ILOG based applications, with our customers reaping the best ROI. I believe we are making good progress in this respect.
As to the financials, I am aware that many MNC much bigger than ILOG have less than 8% of their global revenue in Asia Pacific. In fact, for FY 2004, Asia contribution was 10% of ILOG’s global revenue.
Given the current stage of our operations development in Asia, the focus for us is to ensure long term growth and profitability. I am confident that we will see good growth as we progress in this region. We will grow with Asia as Asia grows.
To meet our shareholders expectations, we need to be focus on every region of our operations world-wide quarterly, Asia is no different.
We believed our growth will be driven by improved economic conditions and the willingness of businesses to commit resources to implement new technologies in this part of the world. We believe that our BRMS strategy addresses an existing and ever increasing need for businesses to integrate and incorporate the ability to change business processes quickly into the company’s technological backbone, its architecture. Our products provide this capability for each and every business sector, leading us to believe that we are well positioned to take advantage of any improvement in the economic and technology investment climate.
Nearly 85% of ILOG's revenue seems to be trickling in through Licenses and subsequent maintenance. While it’s commendable that all three product lines: Rules, Visualization, and Optimization, are contributing a near to equal revenue mix, do you see the consulting business emerging as a key revenue contributor? Specifically, how is ILOG's consulting business poised to grow in Asia?
We have been growing our consulting business over the last three FYs. Consulting revenue will be an important contributor. Growing our service revenue is one of our business strategies.
We have developed service packages and a methodology for assessing, designing and implementing business rules projects to help our customers successfully use our software development tools. When used, this methodology generally results in building flexible and scalable rules architecture and in reducing the development effort. We believe the sale of these services should result in additional revenue, and greater customer satisfaction, which in turn could help us sell additional licenses to that customer.
In Asia, we believe the consulting business pipe will get bigger for both our business partners and us. Increasing, we are seeing both our business partners and End User customers requesting ILOG consultant service directly. This is driven by more customers adopting ILOG technology as well as positive experience with ILOG consultants and our best practices. We have built up a strong experience technical team and will continue to augment the team with more skilled consultants as demand increases.
Can you tell us a bit about ILOG's participation in the Eclipse foundation and how that will eventually stand to benefit end customers?
The Eclipse Platform is an open extensible integrated development environment (IDE) that provides building blocks and a foundation for constructing and using integrated software-development tools.
ILOG joined the Eclipse consortium in February 2004 and in June 2004 introduced ILOG Business Rule Studio™ Developer Edition built entirely on the Eclipse IDE and ILOG JRules™. ILOG JRules, a key offering of ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product family, is already widely acknowledged as being the easiest product of its kind to integrate with the Java environment. Joining Eclipse has helped ensure that business rules are fully integrated in the entire application development lifecycle.
The Eclipse IDE has been gaining popularity in the Java developers community. ILOG’s participaton in the Eclipse Foundation is one of developing plugins for our development environment in JRules and JViews product suite to be integrated into the Eclipse IDE. This will improve the productivity of developers who make use of our products to develop solutions. Because the developers do not need to learn another IDE. All the development capabilities of our JRules and JViews products are accessible by the Eclipse IDE through the plugins. With this, end customers will benefit as developers can be faster to market with their solutions.
For your information, ILOG presented JRules and JViews at Eclipse Con2005, the premier technical and user conference focusing on the power f the Eclipse platform. We presented the integration of JRules and JViews in Eclipse IDE.
ILOG unveiled the first commercial Java graphics toolkit to support the widely adopted Eclipse Platform -- the ILOG JViews 6.5 family of products. How do developers of Eclipse user interfaces stand to benefit?
We announced recently the first commercial Java graphics toolkit to support the widely adopted Eclipse Platform – the ILOG JViews™ 6.5 family of products.
In this latest release, ILOG takes advantage of a new “bridge” which enables developers of Eclipse user interfaces to include Java-based display components. Software developers now can embed rich, graphical Java displays such as charts, diagrams, maps, and schedule displays into their Eclipse-based applications.
Packaged as standalone products, the ILOG JViews family includes JViews Diagrammer 6.5, JViews Charts 6.5, JViews Gantt 6.5, JViews Maps 6.5, and JViews Telecom Graphic Objects (JTGO) 4.5, and is designed so that users have greater visibility, collaboration and control to create graphics applications. For example, in the latest version of JTGO 4.5, the leading tool for building Operational Support System (OSS) interfaces, ILOG added new levels of support for the efficient management of complex networks, including features for creating ready-to-use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) consoles. In addition, the latest releases of Diagrammer 6.5, JViews Charts 6.5 and Gantt 6.5 now support the JavaServer Faces standard, which make it easier to deploy visual and interactive applications in the form of rich web-based clients. The new JViews releases also support the latest Java platform, J2SE 5.0. Using ILOG’s new JViews products, developers can save 50 to 80 percent of development time in creating sophisticated graphical user displays, while making vast quantities of data more comprehensible and manageable to their business users.
Would it be correct to call ILOG JRules the star performer among the ILOG product lines? How has been the feedback on ILOG JRules 5.0, released in late January this year? What is the roadmap for ILOG JRules?
ILOG JRules is a star performer among the ILOG product lines. Three years ago, ILOG Business Rule only accounted for 5% of ILOG’s revenues, now it is 40%.
JRules 5.0 is the most complete enterprise-class business rule management system (BRMS) available for the Java platform. It is built upon award winning previous version of ILOG JRules. Our customers are very happy with this latest release that provides more support for application development, business rule management, and operation and management of the production environment.
ILOG JRules roadmap will be very much customer driven. You can expect more features and innovations to come.
Our readers in India are especially interested in knowing about ILOG's plans for India. Has the partnership with HCL Infosystems worked? Do you have plans to extend it or look at other potential partnerships in the region?
We are happy to note that we are deepening our relationship with large system integrators in India such as Satyam, Infosys and Wipro.
As for HCL Infosystem, due to their reorganization between HCL Infosystem and HCL Technologies quite sometime ago, the momentum has slowed down. However, we are deepening the relationship with HCL Technologies team in the insurance space.
Besides the system integrators, we believe they are world class ISVs in India especially in the telecommunication and the FSI industries. We have had success in establishing partnerships with some of them.
Partnerships with both international and local SIs are important to our success in this region. We will work closely with SIs that will embed ILOG technology in their solutions map as well as those who build capabilities on ILOG technology.
Closing Notes Thanks for taking time to talk to us. SDA-Asia and its readership wish you and ILOG's Asia businesses renewed growth and success. Thanks!
