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Camping World RV retailer reduces costs, manages change with business rules

With ILOG Rules for .NET, Camping World Revises Business Policies in Hours Instead of Weeks

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 5, 2008 -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG, Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced that Camping World, the world's largest retailer of Recreational Vehicles (RVs), accessories and supplies for the RV and outdoor marketplace, is using ILOG Rules for .NET, a key offering in ILOG's Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, to improve responsiveness to changing business conditions while reducing development costs. Using ILOG Rules for .NET, Camping World has been able to reduce the time it takes to change policies from weeks to hours and substantially decrease the information technology (IT) resources required to create, modify and monitor business policies.

By using ILOG's BRMS to categorize revenue from products that do not have a stock-keeping unit (SKU) number such as memberships, rentals and fees, Camping World has used ILOG's BRMS to extend their business analytics to a broader range of products to better measure revenues and understand successful programs.

Camping World serves its customers with more than 75 retail stores, a centralized call center and the Internet. Each night the company processes thousands of transactions through a sophisticated system of business rules that account for taxes, manage discounts and promotions, and classifies types of purchases.

"This project has boosted the capabilities of Camping World as a business. We've enhanced our reporting, reduced our costs and improved our agility in responding to new membership programs and other business policies," said John Lay, IT applications manager, Camping World. "ILOG's technology was a key contributor to the new system. We chose to partner with ILOG because of their tight integration with Visual Studio and native support for Microsoft Office applications."

The rate of business changes at Camping World was accelerating and the company needed a streamlined method to manage them. New membership-based products required a sophisticated set of flexible business policies to appropriately manage the rules of the program and ensure precise execution of discounts to members. Camping World also plans to use a business rules-based process to consolidate sales processing into a single data store and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for reporting. By tracking, revising and managing business policies with ILOG's Rules for .NET, Camping World made business policies easy to read, understand and change using common Microsoft Office(R) applications.

Previously, Camping World's business policies were maintained in Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) software code, which had become increasingly complex and difficult to maintain over time. Changes in business policies required weeks of design, change and testing to ensure revisions to the software code did not impact mission-critical applications. Switching from COBOL to a Microsoft Visual Studio(R) environment with Rules for .NET eliminated the need to sort through thousands of lines of software code, and thoroughly design and test revisions to business policies prior to deployment.

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make it one of the industry's leading providers of business rule management systems (BRMS). Forrester Research has recognized ILOG as a resounding leader in business rules platforms, including the sole leader in rules platforms for .NET, a leader in business rule platforms for Java, for business analysts and for overall feature sets. Customers of ILOG's award-winning BRMS products include eBay, Equifax, Grupo Santander, Travelocity, Visa and many other leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide. ILOG's BRMS product line includes ILOG JRules, ILOG Rules for .NET and ILOG Rules for COBOL. To learn more about ILOG's BRMS products, please visit http://www.ilog.com/products/businessrules.

About 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 systems (BRMS), supply chain applications and 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 Rules for .NET are registered trademarks of ILOG S.A. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.



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