[October 20, 2004] Fair Isaac Extends Support of Mainframes with Introduction of Blaze Advisor for COBOL at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004 ORLANDO, Fla. --(Business Wire)-- Oct. 20, 2004 -- Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for COBOL ensures rules management solutions can complement and upgrade existing mainframe applications Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC), the leading provider of analytics and decision technology, today announced the general availability of Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for COBOL. COBOL - Common Business-Oriented Language - is a common programming language that is found at the heart of many of today's leading organizations' mainframe applications. Blaze Advisor for COBOL allows organizations to incorporate a rules decisioning system that co-exists with and upgrades existing mainframe applications, while reducing development loads on enterprise IT departments. It is designed for any organization that currently has mainframe applications within its enterprise and wants to significantly reduce the time and costs required to incorporate important changes in business priorities into its decision systems. Blaze Advisor helps organizations improve the agility of the enterprise and its operational decision-making. "The introduction of Blaze Advisor for COBOL paves the way for enabling companies to easily modernize their legacy systems by incorporating business logic into Blaze Advisor while continuing to run legacy COBOL applications," said Barbara Errickson-Connor, vice president of application product management for ASG, an end-to-end Application Modernization solutions provider. "This integration allows companies to transition existing applications into Java/.NET over time with the ability to use Blaze Advisor as the rules engine for both legacy and new applications." Typically, when utilizing rule management techniques and business rules on a mainframe, clients have to add Java-based services that require complex interfaces across mainframe regions to their existing Customer Information Control Systems (CICS) and COBOL applications. Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for COBOL addresses this limitation by enabling users to develop rule services that can be compiled to IBM mainframe-standard COBOL, and by enabling these rule services to read and write data in their COBOL copybooks. The solution also includes proven Blaze Advisor features, such as business user control of rules development, decision tree and decision table metaphors for business rules. "The introduction of Blaze Advisor for COBOL is in response to the scores of Fair Isaac customers that leverage mainframe applications as part of their decisioning systems and want to receive the business and IT benefits garnered from a rules management decisioning solution," said Todd Davis, vice president of enterprise decision management at Fair Isaac. "Blaze Advisor for COBOL addresses many of the challenges that are associated with introducing a decisioning system to existing mainframe applications, including integration, performance and IT support. Our customers have welcomed this latest addition as it allows them to easily update their enterprise with the latest decisioning system." Blaze Advisor for COBOL enables users to develop rule services that can be compiled out to 100 percent ANSI-standard COBOL, and allows these rule services to read and write data in COBOL copybooks/CICS interfaces. As with other versions of Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor, business managers can create simple or complex rules using straightforward business terms. Rule maintenance applications can be built against rules deployed to COBOL. Business users can alter rules without IT assistance, once the rules maintenance applications (RMA) are built. This feature enables increased business agility, allowing rules to be modified quickly and easily, requiring IT to simply link and test the final application. As the de facto standard among business rules solutions, Blaze Advisor has hundreds of worldwide customers across multiple industries, including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government and telecommunications. Blaze Advisor has delivered many industry innovations, including rule flows, decision trees, scorecards and versioning to Web-based rule maintenance for business managers. Blaze Advisor is part of Fair Isaac's software and solutions for enterprise decision management (EDM), which combines data analytics, modeling and policy-level control to allow companies to define and manage their automated business systems for improved efficiency and greater profitability. Fair Isaac offers customers a combination of software and services allowing an enterprise to quickly implement customized systems that lower operational costs, reduce risk, and provide greater accuracy and consistency of critical business decisions in interactive and batch applications. About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. For more than 10,000 IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises, Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of their annual planning efforts. Attendees are responsible for more than $35 billion in IT spending for their respective companies, and rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/us/symposiumorlando. About ASG ASG offers migration of existing application logic into reusable component methods and business rules. The company has nearly 20 years of mainframe COBOL support and the ASG-Application DNA(TM) tool (formerly ASG-becubic(TM)), which provides Application Portfolio Management for 100+ environments, including existing COBOL, WebServices, and business rules. About Fair Isaac Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC) is the preeminent provider of creative analytics that unlock value for people, businesses and industries. The company's predictive modeling, decision analysis, intelligence management, decision management systems and consulting services power billions of mission-critical customer decisions a year. Founded in 1956, Fair Isaac helps thousands of companies in over 60 countries acquire customers more efficiently, increase customer value, reduce fraud and credit losses, lower operating expenses and enter new markets more profitably. Most leading banks and credit card issuers rely on Fair Isaac solutions, as do insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers, healthcare organizations, and government agencies. Through the www.myfico.com Web site, consumers use the company's FICO(R) scores, the standard measure of credit risk, to manage their financial health. For more information, contact www.fairisaac.com. Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Information Except for historical information contained herein, the statements contained in this press release that relate to Fair Isaac, including statements regarding its Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor for COBOL offering, and the benefits to be derived from this offering, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including any unforeseen technical difficulties related to the implementation, use and functionality of the offering, the risks that customers will not perceive material benefits from the offering, failure of the product to deliver the expected results, the possibility of errors or defects in the offering, regulatory changes applicable to the use of consumer credit and other data, and other risks described from time to time in Fair Isaac's SEC reports, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2003, and quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2004. Forward-looking statements should be considered with caution. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves incorrect, Fair Isaac's results could differ materially from Fair Isaac's expectations in these statements. Fair Isaac disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Fair Isaac and FICO are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation, in the United States and/or in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]