Software Delivers Dramatic ROI, Has Revolutionized the Way Industries Operate WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- INFORMS ANNUAL MEETING -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced ILOG CPLEX(R), the world's most widely-used optimization software, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Used by more than 1,300 commercial customers, including 160 members of the Global 500 and hundreds of leading independent software vendors in supply chain, customer relationship and asset management, ILOG CPLEX has revolutionized the way companies do business in industries from energy to medical devices by delivering dramatic returns on investment through improved operational efficiency. The announcement was made today at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Washington, Oct. 12-15, 2008. Used by operations research (OR) and management science professionals and leveraged by corporate planning departments and operational teams, optimization software improves business efficiency and decision making by allowing businesses to calculate the best utilization of existing resources and implement an action plan that can potentially deliver millions of dollars in savings. Here are just a few more examples of how ILOG CPLEX has revolutionized a range of industries: -- CPLEX has transformed how the power industry solves unit commitment problems by allowing for these problems to be addressed in commercial software for the first time. Unit commitment is the process of managing power station operating times. For Red Electrica de Espana (REE) -- the company in charge of managing the power supply systems in the Canary Islands, Balearic Islands and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla -- CPLEX enabled REE to reduce production costs by one to two percent, which translates into savings of between 50,000 and 100,000 Euros per day. At the same time, CPLEX helped REE reduce its carbon emissions by two-and-a-half percent -- which represents approximately 100,000 tons of CO2 annually. -- CPLEX was instrumental in encouraging the widespread adoption of optimization technology in the airline industry by making it possible to solve real-world instances of critical scheduling and planning problems efficiently and reliably. At the United Parcel Service (UPS), CPLEX is used to optimize routes, fleet assignments, and package flows for UPS Airlines. With each plane costing in excess of $100 million, the long-term savings in aircraft ownership costs are expected to exceed the savings in operational costs. -- United States Postal Service (USPS) has realized more than $10 million in savings to date by leveraging ILOG CPLEX for a strategic transportation management initiative. Developed by USPS and IBM, the Highway Corridor Analytic Program (HCAP) uses advanced technology to analyze USPS highway transportation scenarios and identify cost saving opportunities. HCAP model uses ILOG CPLEX to identify the best allocation of mail among transportation resources. "CPLEX has revolutionized how operations research is done in practice. With CPLEX, the applicability of optimization has increased by orders of magnitude," said Michael Trick, professor of operations research, Carnegie Mellon University. "For the past 20 years, CPLEX has been a critical tool in a wide range of industries where OR plays a vital role, and I expect it will continue to be a significant tool for OR professionals for the next 20 years to come." Innovator in Optimization Technology First unveiled in 1988, ILOG CPLEX's arrival coincided with the desire of users to move from expensive mainframe computers to workstations and personal computers to solve their planning and scheduling problems. It also introduced many industry firsts and performance innovations to the field of optimization. -- It was the first commercial linear optimizer on the market written in the C language, which made CPLEX highly portable. This feature, combined with the industry's first Callable Library, simplified application design by making it possible to embed optimization into planning applications. -- Industry-first enhancements to Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) algorithms in CPLEX made it possible to solve complex problems tens of thousands of variables in real-time, such as airline crew scheduling, where this capability made real-time rescheduling possible in response to weather or other events. -- Quadratic Programming (QP) and MIP integration which allowed for the accurate assessment of risk in the securities portfolio management industry. -- ILOG CPLEX(R) has consistently broken performance records -- including its own. In 2007, it demonstrated version-over-version processing times more than 10-times faster, on average, for the most complex business problems -- enabling the software to address larger, more complicated problems that were often unsolvable by previous generations of optimization software. In fact, due to advances in both hardware performance and algorithms, CPLEX can solve optimization problems, in many cases, more than a million times faster today than twenty years ago. For more information on CPLEX history and milestones, please visit http://www.ilog.com/products/cplex/news/history.cfm Leading organizations worldwide use ILOG optimization tools and, engines to solve the world's most challenging planning and scheduling problems. These customers include APL, BNSF, JR East, Logistics, Maersk, Schneider, SNCF, United Airlines, the United States Postal Service and UPS in transportation and logistics; and Airbus, Coors, Dell, Hansol Paper, Michelin, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Nippon Steel, Nissan, Porsche, Saint Gobain, Thyssen Krupp, and Toyota in manufacturing. ILOG optimization products are also used by a majority of leading Supply Chain Management software vendors, including Infor, Manhattan Associates, JDA, Oracle, Red Prairie and SAP, as well as in research programs at over 1,000 universities around the world, making the products the "gold standard" for performance and solution quality in the Operations Research community. For more information, please visit http://www.ilog.com/products/optimization. ILOG ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 3,000 corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), supply chain planning and scheduling applications, as well as its optimization and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 850 people worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.ilog.com/. ILOG and ILOG CPLEX are registered trademarks of ILOG S.A. and ILOG Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners. DATASOURCE: ILOG CONTACT: Monika Raj of ILOG, +1-408-991-7128, Web site: http://www.ilog.com/

Copyright