Fair Isaac Delivers Enhanced Rules Management Platform for Microsoft .NET

Fair Isaac Corporation, the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, announced today from the company’s InterACT 06 conference the immediate availability of Blaze Advisor™ 6.1 for .NET. This new technology integration makes one of today’s fastest and most flexible rules management solutions available on Microsoft’s industry-leading software for connecting information, people, systems and devices through Web services.

As part of Fair Isaac’s solutions and technologies for Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), Blaze Advisor 6.1 for .NET enables businesses to incorporate rules-based decisioning software that cooperates with and upgrades existing applications, regardless of platform or programming language. Microsoft and Fair Isaac customers will be able to leverage the Blaze Advisor system for the .NET environment to modernize existing systems and deploy new services to their enterprise systems.

“We’re excited to see that Fair Isaac is furthering its support for Microsoft’s platform technologies through the release of Blaze Advisor 6.1,” said Tim O’Brien, group manager, Platform Strategy Group at Microsoft. “Blaze Advisor’s support of .NET demonstrates Fair Isaac’s commitment to meeting our customers’ need for a more flexible application development platform.”

Blaze Advisor 6.1 for .NET delivers the power of Rete III, Fair Isaac’s exclusive rules execution technology that is optimized for data and rules-intensive problems. Combined with Blaze Advisor capabilities, Rete III provides a decision management engine that processes and executes complex, high-volume business rules faster and more efficiently than other rules management systems in both batch and interactive applications.

“Blaze Advisor for .NET offers unmatched performance, an enterprise-class repository, excellent support for business ownership and much more, all on the .NET Framework,” said Carole-Ann Matignon, vice president of product management for Enterprise Decision Management technologies at Fair Isaac. “This release ensures that .NET customers have the business rules management system they need for their most demanding decisioning problems.”

Fair Isaac and Microsoft are working together to provide institutions with new opportunities in renewing channels. Today, many banks, insurance companies and capital market firms are focusing on integration as well as updating a host of decentralized channels — such as the branch, storefront advisor, independent agent, call centers, the internet, interactive voice response, mobile banking and others — to achieve better cost base management and cross-channel consistency. Using the companies’ complementary business rules and .NET technologies, institutions can create reusable business components when renewing any one channel, so that those components can be leveraged for renewing all channels. In addition, businesses can improve experiences by treating customers more consistently across channels, and by helping internal staff share and employ best practices for customer service across channels.

Blaze Advisor for .NET also offers COBOL and Java variants, further extending Fair Isaac’s cross-platform development suite.

“Fair Isaac has the strongest multiplatform features,” noted John R. Rymer, vice president at Forrester Research, in a report entitled “Fair Isaac Is the Deepest Business Rules Platform,” published by Forrester Research, Inc. in January 2006. Developers can use the same rules language and modeling tools to generate applications for Java, .NET, and mainframes (in COBOL). Fair Isaac also offers a strong range of server deployment modes and can be deployed on a wide range of operating systems.

Fair Isaac’s business rules technology can support many of Microsoft’s platform technology programs. Microsoft’s Managing Director of Worldwide Banking, David Vander, will address Microsoft’s Channel Renewal focus in a presentation at Fair Isaac’s InterACT conference, which runs through May 3 in San Francisco.