Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor 6.5 for .NET Brings Enterprise-Class Business Rules Management to the Microsoft Platform

Updated release of market-leading business rules management system optimized for Microsoft .NET




(Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA) - Fair Isaac Corporation (NYSE:FIC), the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today announced the availability of Blaze Advisor™ 6.5 for .NET. This latest offering brings enterprise-class business rules management capabilities to Microsoft’s industry-leading software for connecting information, people, systems and devices through Web services.

As a core part of Fair Isaac’s technologies for Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), Blaze Advisor enables non-programmers to design, deploy, execute and maintain business rules and policies as part of an automated business application. Blaze Advisor 6.5 for the Microsoft .NET environment allows businesses to modernize existing applications and deploy new services to their enterprise systems by leveraging a shared repository of rules and analytics, and a common development environment across different platforms and programming languages.

As a key member of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance formed to drive mainstream adoption of Business Process Management (BPM), Fair Isaac is delivering a powerful set of end-to-end tools on top of Microsoft’s business process platform: BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server and .NET Framework.

“The capabilities being delivered in Blaze Advisor 6.5 for .NET are making BPM solutions more broadly accessible and helping companies take advantage of BPM tools based on the Microsoft platform,” said Burley Kawasaki, Director of Product Management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft Corp. “Blaze Advisor’s continued support for the .NET Framework demonstrates Fair Isaac’s commitment to customers’ needs for a more flexible application development platform.”

“Blaze Advisor 6.5 for .NET offers enterprises with diverse IT environments as well as dedicated Microsoft shops greater agility and flexibility throughout the business rules lifecycle,” said Carole-Ann Matignon, vice president of Enterprise Decision Management Technologies at Fair Isaac. “This latest version of Blaze Advisor enables Microsoft customers to quickly adapt their operational decisions to changing business and regulatory demands. It delivers comprehensive support for moving business rules from development to production, and helps businesses manage predictive models as part of their rules repository.”

Details of Advanced Capabilities

* Increased Accuracy and Reliability - New capabilities in version 6.5 allow business users to better verify and validate the completeness and consistency of rules across the rules lifecycle, significantly increasing the accuracy and reliability of the inferencing process. Blaze Advisor 6.5 for .NET also features comprehensive support for business rules unit and regression testing to validate rules.
* Deployment Platform for Predictive Models - Version 6.5 includes tight integration with Model Builder for Predictive Analytics 3.6, Fair Isaac’s software platform for developing and deploying predictive models. This allows for the swift and flexible application of analytics as an essential decision element, helping businesses maximize the precision of every decision.
* Rapid Application Development - Release 6.5 also integrates with SmartForms, Blaze Advisor technology that enables users to create smart, interactive data and logic-aware web applications with ease.
* Support for Popular Microsoft Technologies - Microsoft-specific functionality in Blaze Advisor 6.5 for .NET includes support for .NET Framework versions 2.0 and 3.0, Internet Explorer 7 and the Windows Vista operating system. Blaze Advisor 6.5 for .NET also introduces support for x64, allowing business rules to be deployed on 64-bit Microsoft architectures.

Using Fair Isaac and Microsoft’s complementary business rules and .NET technologies allows companies in many industries to support their most complex business applications. Financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies can, for example, update a host of decentralized channels. Blaze Advisor for .NET allows them to create reusable business components that can be leveraged across channels - the branch, storefront advisor, call centers, the internet and others - to achieve better, cost-based management and cross-channel consistency. In addition, organizations 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.