Fair Isaac to Participate in the IBM SOA Specialty Program

Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE: FIC) today announced that it has entered a new marketing alliance agreement with IBM, and also has joined the IBM SOA (service-oriented architecture) Specialty Program. The companies plan to leverage the certified integration of Fair Isaac’s market-leading Blaze Advisor(TM) business rules management system with the IBM SOA Foundation – a single, unified platform that combines the industry’s top application server and integration capabilities to deliver results for clients worldwide.

The companies are planning joint messaging and related activities under the marketing alliance and, as part of this effort, Fair Isaac will participate in IBM SOA educational events.

Last year, IBM announced the IBM SOA Specialty, a marketing initiative for IBM Business Partners in the IBM PartnerWorld for Industry Networks program. SOA enables business flexibility through the integration of often disparate systems, data, applications, and processes across and beyond an enterprise, giving organizations the power to reduce complexities, extend the value of existing IT investments and dynamically respond to changing business conditions.

The IBM SOA certification demonstrates Fair Isaac’s ability to provide specific customer solutions in a service-oriented architecture by integrating its Blaze Advisor system with the IBM WebSphere software platform and specifically the WebSphere Process Server. Blaze Advisor accelerates and simplifies strategy execution with enterprise business rules to help businesses more efficiently manage mission-critical business processes. It delivers strategic benefits including improved customer service and responsiveness, higher revenues, regulatory compliance, quicker time-to-market, and reduced overall IT and operational costs.

"Fair Isaac is a leader in automating business decisions, and I welcome their integration with the IBM SOA Platform," said Tom Rosamilia, Vice President, WebSphere, IBM Software Group. "Blaze Advisor business rules technology extends the concept of business agility and adds value for our mutual customers."

"The benefits and strategic advantages of implementing business rules technology together with SOA architectures are being demonstrated across many industries," said Mark Layden, Fair Isaac Vice President of EDM Technologies and Custom Solutions. "The validation of Blaze Advisor into IBM’s SOA framework promises new levels of speed, flexibility, agility, and adaptability for business applications in organizations of every size, in every industry."

The use of Blaze Advisor within a service-oriented architecture provides clear benefits through the separation of decision logic from application functionality. Blaze Advisor ensures that disparate applications behave consistently, are able to automate complex decisions and quickly adapt to changing business requirements. It also offers organizations the ability to incrementally transition from legacy systems to a service-oriented architecture.

As the industry standard among business rules solutions, Blaze Advisor has hundreds of worldwide customers across multiple industries, including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government and telecommunications. It is the first rules engine to support Java, .NET and COBOL deployment of the same rules. The multi-platform solution supports Web Services and SOA, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms, Microsoft .NET, and COBOL for z/OS mainframes.

Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor is a core technology of the company’s suite of products for Enterprise Decision Management, which combines data analytics, predictive modeling, decision model optimization and policy-level control to help organizations define and manage their automated business systems for improved efficiency and greater profitability.