Fair Isaac Offers More Decision Management Innovation with Blaze Advisor 6.0
IBM certifies Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor’s industry-leading business rules management technology across all major platforms
MINNEAPOLIS -- May 9, 2005 -- Fair Isaac Corporation, a leading provider of analytics and decision technology, today announced release 6.0 of Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor. The latest version of Fair Isaac’s business rules management software accelerates and simplifies strategy execution with enterprise business rules to help businesses reach new levels of agility in an increasingly complex, competitive, and regulated global economy.
Building upon a tradition of bringing innovative capabilities to the rules market, Blaze Advisor 6.0 further demonstrates Fair Isaac’s continued investment in and commitment to enterprise decision management.
“With Blaze Advisor 6.0, Fair Isaac is once again delivering market-leading and industry-proven rules management capabilities that have been developed and refined through years of working with today’s leading organizations,” said Todd Davis, vice president of Enterprise Decision Management Software at Fair Isaac. “From best practices documentation to new enterprise rules management capabilities, this major release is designed to improve both time to market and execution agility throughout the organization.”
Additionally, Fair Isaac and IBM have implemented a rigorous testing and validation program for Blaze Advisor as part of their ongoing strategic alliance. IBM has certified that Blaze Advisor is optimized across all of its major platforms, including IBM iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries.
“IBM has delivered enterprise-class solutions utilizing Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor as the decision management technology for customer applications in multiple vertical industries,” said June Felix, general manager for Banking Solutions at IBM. “As a Premier-level IBM partner, Fair Isaac continues to provide market-leading innovations to our joint customers with Blaze Advisor 6.0. This latest release of Blaze Advisor further differentiates Fair Isaac, extending its vision for Enterprise Decision Management.”
Enterprise-Level Rules Management
Since 2000, Blaze Advisor has provided business users with the ability to manage and control their policies via rules maintenance applications. Blaze Advisor 6.0 takes Fair Isaac’s rules management capabilities to the enterprise level by offering greater flexibility in allocating strategy ownership across the enterprise, encouraging reuse while consistently enforcing corporate standards, business practices and key strategies.
Using Blaze Advisor 6.0, large projects consisting of hundreds of thousands of rules can be segmented per business domain and actively managed by their accountable owners. Best practices documentation helps accelerate time to market with rules projects by guiding their repository design for best performance and maintainability over time. As rules proliferate across the enterprise, lifecycle capabilities, such as release management provided in Blaze Advisor 6.0, become vital. Customizable management properties and queries for both technical and business users further enhance the rules management characteristics.
Blaze 6.0 offers individual business domains increased market agility, while helping the enterprise maintain consistency across all touch points. Insurance or credit card applications from an agency, call center or consumer Web can be processed consistently. Corporate and local strategies can be managed behind the scenes according to line of business, geography and/or sales channel, helping to ensure compliance as well as agile and localized responses to market conditions. Blaze Advisor 6.0 also is designed to help business owners achieve new levels of accountability for strategy realization, while IT functions maintain the ability to manage the overall application infrastructure.
“Inquiries about business rules technologies indicate that enterprise rules are increasingly the priority,” said John R. Rymer, vice president at Forrester Research, in the September 2004 Forrester Research, Inc. report The Path to Enterprise Business Rules. “Forrester spoke with seven advanced business rules users. The primary driver of these projects is the need to automate business processes while still keeping pace with changing regulations, customer preferences, and other volatile business factors.”
New SmartForms Interact with Blaze Advisor
Fair Isaac also announced today the availability of Blaze Advisor SmartForms. This new product extension addresses the challenging problem of data quality.
At the point of sale, in a call center or self-service Web application, bad data can be extremely costly to process. Round trips with the customer require additional personnel or server hardware, incomplete forms may result in lost opportunities, and extensive forms may result in higher abandon rates. Ultimately, these factors may have a negative impact on corporate image.
Blaze Advisor SmartForms adds intelligence to Web forms. Rules are embedded in the form itself to ensure data correctness and completeness. Extensive forms are streamlined to expose only the relevant questions – as the customer makes selections, more questions may appear on the screen. Rules are executed in the browser to avoid unnecessary and time-consuming round trips to the server. Blaze Advisor customers can coordinate sophisticated processes in one tool by combining SmartForms with server-side decisioning components, rules or analytic models.
Blaze Advisor supports Web Services, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and Message-Driven Beans (MDB) in Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms, Microsoft .NET, Transaction Server and Component Object Model (COM), IBM mainframes, and legacy systems. As the de facto standard among business rules solutions, Blaze Advisor has hundreds of worldwide customers across multiple industries, including financial services, insurance, health care, government and telecommunications. It has delivered many industry innovations, including rule flows, decision trees, scorecards, rule-level versioning and Web-based rules maintenance applications for business managers.
About Fair Isaac
Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) is provides creative analytics that unlock value for people, businesses and industries. The company’s predictive modeling, decision analysis, intelligence management, decision management systems and consulting services power billions of mission-critical customer decisions a year. For more information on Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor, visit http://www.fairisaac.com/rules.