(Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall)PARIS, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) and Sodifrance (Euronext: SOA), a French systems integrator specializing in IT modernization, today announced a technical partnership agreement aimed at helping organizations simplify their legacy modernization efforts -- including helping these organizations move to service-oriented architectures (SOA) more easily. According to the agreement, the two companies will market a joint solution based on ILOG's business rule management system (BRMS) that will enable organizations to extract, map and re-use the business rules written in COBOL software code to enhance flexibility and improve business response times.

Currently, a large fraction of critical applications of major corporations are written in COBOL. These applications contain the business logic of a company's core processes and, over the years, go through many changes and additions that make them harder and more costly to maintain. Added to this is the shortage of COBOL skills: only a few specialists are now capable of maintaining them. As a result, business policies written in COBOL and stored in mainframes cannot be easily reviewed or changed, slowing business response times.

ILOG and Sodifrance have joined forces to provide a joint solution, comprising services expertise from Sodifrance with ILOG Rules for COBOL(R) add-on module -- which is available for use with ILOG JRules(R). With the technology and know-how of Sodifrance, business rules are extracted from COBOL code that is buried in the mainframe system. Then, using Rules for COBOL, IBM mainframe customers can author and manage their business rules and from those business rules generate native COBOL in the format of COBOL sub-programs. The structured COBOL sub-program code is then deployed into the business application system using Sodifrance's CASE system. Using the joint solution, business rules that are extracted are managed as strategic enterprise assets with the appropriate governance.

"Sodifrance has a long history of understanding and transforming legacy application assets, especially those written in COBOL," said Yves Lennon, CEO of Sodifrance. "Advanced solutions today extract the business rules from the program data. The ability to re-inject them into ILOG's BRMS takes the upgrading of COBOL legacy applications to a new level."

"We have several clients for which both our Business Rules Management System (BRMS) and legacy COBOL are integral parts of their corporate architecture," said Desmond Delandro, VP Strategic Alliances of ILOG. "These customers want to leverage their existing and substantial technology investment in their legacy COBOL applications.