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A Leader in Advanced Analytics for Desktop and Cloud

Frontline Systems is a leading vendor of advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics software, used to make analytics-powered decisions. Its tools for decisions using mathematical optimization, business rules, Monte Carlo simulation and risk analysis, and data mining, text mining and forecasting are used by 10,000 organizations -- on desktops, servers, and in the cloud, using Azure, Microsoft 365, Power Platform and Dynamics 365. Frontlne's customers build decision models using Microsoft Excel for the Web, Windows and Macintosh with its Analytic Solver product family; in programming languages using Frontline's Solver SDK and XLMiner SDK, and in web and mobile apps using its new RASON® Decision Services platform and REST API.

Over 1.2 billion copies of Frontline's Solvers for optimization have been distributed to users, in every copy of Microsoft Office sold since 1990, and Frontline's Excel Solver upgrade products, sold directly to advanced users, are by far the market leaders in their field. In 2010 Frontline won the INFORMS Impact Prize for this work. Frontline has a leadership position in cloud-based analytics, with over 2 million users, and 2 of the "best 10 Google Sheets add-ons". Frontline was the first vendor was the first vendor to offer business analysts easy access to Big Data in compute clusters running Apache Spark. Frontline Solvers are also the clear #1 choice in MBA programs around the world, used by over 500,000 students, covered in over 35 textbooks, and the exclusive software used in several market-leading textbooks.

Frontline's corporate customers -- including over 1,100 firms with $1 billion revenue and up -- are global leaders in many industries including financial services, aerospace, automotive, telecommunications, utilities, transportation, and manufacturing, as well as commercial, government, and academic research centers. Its individual users, often business analysts and managers, build data mining, simulation- and optimization-based decision models, faster and with less effort than with other software, usually without any programming. These models are used to analyze risk and decide how to best allocate scarce resources - money, equipment, and people - often yielding savings of millions of dollars.

Analytics Technology Leadership

With a long history of "firsts" in analytic software, Frontline is widely regarded as a technology leader -- especially today in cloud-based decision management or "digital decisioning" systems. During its 30-year history, Frontline was among the first to apply genetic and evolutionary algorithms to spreadsheet models, and to use GPUs in evolutionary algorithms, first to deliver algebraic "convexity testing" for analytic models, and first to deliver commercial software using robust optimization, as well as classical stochastic programming and simulation optimization methods. The company is also a technology leader in data and text mining, risk modeling, and global optimization.

Cloud-based Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics

Frontline's Analytic Solver Cloud version, usable through a browser or in desktop Excel for Windows or Mac, offers business analysts a familiar environment with point-and-click tools to create predictive and prescriptive analytics models themselves, without needing expert data scientists or programmers – yet taking advantage of the full spectrum of analytic methods, from DMN-compatible business rules and decision tables, to forecasting, data mining and machine learning, to simulation for managing uncertainty and risk, and optimization to coordinate many decisions at once. Models created this way are highly reusable -- not just in Excel, but as "instant decision services" usable in Microsoft Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate, and embedded in any custom application using Frontline's REST APIs and server-side SDKs.

RASON® Modeling and REST API

Frontline's RASON Decision Services is a complete platform for deploying, managing and governing, and monitoring use of analytics-powered decisions. It enables business analysts, IT pros and developers to work together on analytic models, and deploy them far more easily for use throughout an organization. RASON -- RESTful Analytic Solver® Object Notation -- is a high-level modeling language for mathematical optimization, business rules, Monte Carlo simulation and risk analysis, and data mining, text mining and forecasting, embedded in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). RASON models can be solved via simple REST API calls to a powerful cloud-based server that organizations can use on a subscription basis. For server- and desktop-based applications, RASON models can be solved using Frontline's Solver SDK (below).

Powerful SDK Tools for Developers

Frontline Systems offers powerful SDK tools to allow developers to rapidly prototype and deploy models outside Excel on desktops, servers, or in the cloud. Solver SDK users can easily define models in their choice of object-oriented programming languages; define models in Excel and use them to solve problems on servers without Excel; or define models in Frontline's new RASON modeling language -- using any of four built-in solvers or eight plug-in Solver Engines that integrate the world's best optimizers from other vendors. XLMiner SDK users can use a powerful, high-level API for to quickly create predictive analytics, using a wide range of forecasting, data mining, and text mining algorithms.

Training and Support Services

Frontline helps business analysts learn to use advanced analytics in many ways -- from in-product Wizards and contextual Help to its Solver.Academy self-paced online courses. Frontline's technical support and consulting assistance, handling thousands of support tickets per month with an average 12-hour response time and 90% user satisfaction rating, is highly regarded in the industry. With our help, Excel users and programmers around the world have built highly successful applications of optimization, often in record time. We're proud of our track record of helping our customers -- most of whom have no formal training in operations research or management science -- to achieve cost savings and profit improvements of millions of dollars.

The #1 Choice Among MBA Programs Worldwide

Frontline Solvers are also the clear #1 choice in MBA programs around the world, used by over 500,000 students, featured in over 45 textbooks, and the exclusive software used in several market-leading textbooks. With Analytic Solver Platform for Education, professors have one integrated tool they can use to teach data mining and predictive analytics, optimization, simulation, and decision analysis, saving classroom time and enhancing the student learning experience. Frontline Systems also offers its full commercial solvers at significant discounts and comprehensive support for both professors and their universitys' IT departments.

Individual Products

Frontline's new RASON Decision Services enables business analysts, IT pros and developers to work together. RASON itself is a high-level modeling language, embedded in JSON (familiar to every web developer), yet containing the entire Excel formula language (familiar to every business analyst) as a subset. Every model in RASON is available as a cloud decision service, via a standard REST API, with full CRUD operations, requests in JSON, and responses in JSON or OData. A "web portal" at Rason.com includes tools to try out the REST API, create secure connections to over 100 cloud data sources, manage secure API tokens, and monitor model runs. A browser-based text editor can be used to create RASON models, and a DMN DRD-style diagram editor can be used to create multi-stage "decision flows" composed of SQL operations, data transformations, forecasting and machine learning, optimization and simulation, and business rule and decision table stages. RASON's automatically-generated OData endpoints make it easy for other applications to consume analytic model results as data, a key idea.

Frontline's new Analytic Solver® Comprehensive is the integrated tool that enables a business analyst to "do it all in Excel," with point-and-click rapid model-building instead of R or Python programming. It includes all the capabilities of Analytic Solver Data Mining for data visualization, data mining and machine learning, text mining, and time series forecasting; all the capabilities of Analytic Solver Simulation for Monte Carlo simulation and risk analysis, decision trees, simulation optimization, stochastic programming and robust optimization; and all the capabilities of Analytic Solver Optimization, by far the leading tool for large-scale conventional optimization in Excel. Working closely with RASON, Analytic Solver enables business analysts to deploy their Excel-based analytic models to the Azure cloud, "point and click" without web developer skills or IT assistance. Those new to analytic modeling find Analytic Solver's Guided Mode, Constraint Wizard, Distribution Wizard, and new Deployment Wizard, and its extensive Help and online courses at Solver.Academy invaluable. With point-and-click ease, enterprise-grade power, and deep integration, Analytic Solver Comprehensive is a business analyst's dream come true.

Frontline's Analytic Solver Data Mining (formerly XLMiner® Platform) offers deep functionality and performance rivaling far more expensive products, in data mining and machine learning, text mining and time series forecasting. It can sample data or import text from sources ranging from Excel's PowerPivot in-memory multidimensional database, to Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server databases, to Apache Spark Big Data clusters. It includes data visualization, feature selection, and transformation tools, clustering and principal components, association rules, exponential smoothing and ARIMA forecasting models, very powerful linear and logistic regression, and ensembles of classification and regression trees and neural networks. Trained models can be used to "score" new data in SQL databases, or to classify or predict in spreadsheet models.

Frontline's Analytic Solver Simulation (formerly Risk Solver® Platform) is an integrated product that offers by far the most comprehensive, highest performance optimization and simulation available in Microsoft Excel. It is the only product that can find robust optimal solutions for Excel models in the presence of risk and uncertainty, using the methods of robust optimization, stochastic programming and simulation optimization. It's the only product that can automatically diagnose the structure of optimization models with uncertainty and choose the best solution methods for any given model. Risk Solver Platform includes all the capabilities of Premium Solver Platform, all the capabilities of Risk Solver Pro, and more. And it deeply exploits multi-core processors to solve difficult nonlinear and non-smooth problems in record time.

Frontline's Analytic Solver Optimization (formerly Premium Solver® Platform) is by far the leading software for spreadsheet optimization. It works with existing Excel Solver models, yet with plug-in Solver Engines it can solve problems a thousand times larger, at speeds up to hundreds of times faster than the standard Solver. It goes well beyond conventional optimization (linear, mixed-integer and non-linear programming) to support convex and conic optimization, global optimization, constraint programming, and genetic and evolutionary algorithms. And it can automatically diagnose the structure of conventional optimization models, and choose the best solution methods.

Frontline's Solver SDK® Platform makes the company's full suite of Solvers for optimization, plus a Monte Carlo simulation engine, available to developers through an object-oriented API in a wide range of platforms and languages, for desktop, server, Web and mobile applications -- from C++, C#, and Java to JavaScript and PHP, as well as MATLAB and Visual Basic. The SDK is the only product that can load Excel workbooks containing optimization and simulation models, and use them to solve problems on servers without Excel -- even on Linux It also includes an interpreter for Frontline's new RASON™ modeling language, enabling business analysts and professional programmers to easily work together on an application. And it includes parallelized algorithms to exploit modern multi-core processors, without requiring extra work by developers.

Frontline's XLMiner SDK Platform is a powerful, comprehensive Software Development Kit for building predictive analytics applications, using a wide range of forecasting, data mining and text mining algorithms -- from exponential smoothing, ARIMA, multiple linear regression and logistic regression to ensembles of classification and regression trees and neural networks, to stemming, term normalization, vocabulary reduction, and latent semantic indexing for text. XLMiner SDK Platform supports today's most popular programming languages: C++, C# and .NET, Java, Python and R. It offers a high-level object-oriented API that allows developers to work with objects such as DataFrames, Estimators and Models, and easily construct "pipelines" composed of multiple data mining operations.

Frontline's eight Solver Engines "plug in" to Analytic Solver Platform, Risk Solver Platform, Premium Solver Platform and Solver SDK Platform, to solve challenging problems with hundreds of thousands of variables and constraints. Unlike other software for optimization and simulation, Frontline's Solver Engines can be used with Excel, the RASON modeling language, MATLAB, Java, all .NET and COM languages, and many other programming languages -- all for the price of one license. The latest of these, the Gurobi Solver Engine, features remarkable performance on challenging linear mixed-integer (LP/MIP) optimization models.

History

Frontline Systems was founded by Dan Fylstra in 1987 in Palo Alto, California, and relocated to Incline Village, Nevada, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, in 1992. By 1990, the company had begun working with Microsoft on early versions of Windows and Microsoft Excel. As Windows and Excel took over the spreadsheet market from Lotus 1-2-3, Frontline's market share in spreadsheet optimization expanded dramatically, in both the OEM and advanced end user markets. On many occasions Frontline has been first to introduce new simulation technology and new optimization technology in an easy-to-use form, for a wide range of business decisions. With one of the fastest new product cycles in the industry, Frontline is continually delivering new technology for data mining, risk analysis, and optimization to support critical business resource allocation decisions.

Further Information

Frontline Systems Inc.
press@solver.com
Tel 775-831-0300 x114 Fax 775-831-0314