Santander Chooses ILOG JRules for Services-Orientated Architecture Initiative

Europe’s Leading Bank To Use BRMS to Enhance Business Agility and Shorten Business Response Times

MADRID – June 28, 2006 – ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced that Santander, the largest bank in the euro zone and the fourth largest in Europe by market capitalization, has chosen ILOG JRules™, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, as an essential element of its new services-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. As part of BANKSPHERE, Santander’s multi-channel banking middleware platform, ILOG JRules will be used to automate decision-making and policy management across the entire organization, while enhancing business agility and shortening business response times.

Santander decided to adopt an SOA strategy to streamline its IT infrastructure from front to back-office, with the goals of continuously improving customer service and reducing costs. The objective was to have a single platform across all banks in the Group to standardize processes and create product factories (back-office systems able to process the products for various distribution channels – under different brands – or for different packages). By integrating ILOG JRules in their SOA infrastructure, Santander will maximize the re-usability and adaptability of its platform across all banks. Moreover, the use of rules will guarantee that the banks will be able to respond quickly to changes in regulations and market conditions.

In addition to the SOA initiative, Santander is already evaluating JRules for additional projects, including risk qualification, buying propensity and debt qualification, subscriptions, as well as the listing and selection of documents for a banking transaction.

“Santander considers IT a key component of its business strategy,” said Maite Agujetas, Chief Architecture Officer at Santander. “We are confident that the implementation of ILOG JRules in BANKSPHERE will help us enhance our competitiveness by making a significant contribution towards harmonizing our IT infrastructure and ensuring we can react quickly to changing business conditions.”

BRMS Essential to SOA
Reuse of decision services is a key element of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) value proposition. However, without visibility and ready access into the decision services available for reuse, multiple versions of services will result, preventing an enterprise from fully benefiting from its SOA strategy. A BRMS enables businesses to create decision services that are truly reusable, owned by business users, easy to adapt and that contribute to an enterprise compliance strategy – what ILOG refers to as “Transparent Decision Services”. The services are transparent because a BRMS provides easy access to the rules in the decision service to all the participants of its lifecycle: developers, integration developers, service owners and policy managers – eliminating the “black box” created using a standard software coding practices, such as Java and C#. ILOG’s BRMS further enhances the reuse value proposition of SOA because it offers the closest integration available with the leading SOA platforms from IBM, Oracle, BEA and Microsoft, speeding the adoption of Transparent Decision Services.

About Santander
Santander (SAN.MC, STD.N) is the largest bank in the euro zone and the fourth largest in Europe by market capitalization. Founded in 1857, Santander has EUR 809 billion in assets and EUR 961 billion in managed funds, more than 66 million customers, 129,000 employees, and 10, 200 offices in 40 countries. It is the largest financial group in Spain and Latin America, and has significant market positions elsewhere in Europe, including the United Kingdom through its Abbey subsidiary and Portugal, where it is the third largest bank. Through Santander Consumer Finance, it also operates a leading consumer finance franchise in Germany, Italy, Spain and nine other European countries. In 2005, Santander recorded EUR 6. 22 billion in net profit, up 72.5% from the previous year. For more information on Santander, visit www.gruposantander.com.

About ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,500 corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), 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 730 people worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.ilog.com.

ILOG is a registered trademark of ILOG and ILOG JRules is a trademark of ILOG. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.