Frontline Systems Releases Analytic Solver® V2017-R2 Software for Excel, Power BI, and AnalyticSolver.com
INCLINE VILLAGE, NEVADA (PRWEB) September 12, 2017 -- Frontline Systems is shipping a new product line release for desktop and cloud, Analytic Solver® 2017-R2 for Excel and enhancements to AnalyticSolver.com, its SaaS equivalent. The new release features major performance improvements in optimization, new distribution and correlation functionality in simulation/risk analysis, and a new, radically simple way to convert Excel analytic models into Power BI® custom visuals, for distribution to "BI consumers" throughout an organization.
“We’re not only making advanced analytics power tools and learning aids accessible to every business analyst,” said Daniel Fylstra, Frontline’s President and CEO. “We're making the fruits of their efforts -- working analytic models and their insights -- readily accessible to everyone who needs them.”
Automatic Creation of Power BI Custom Visuals from Excel Analytic Models
Microsoft's popular Power BI business intelligence and data visualization platform now enables expert independent developers to create JavaScript-based "custom visuals" to be used in Power BI reports and dashboards. But for Excel-literate business analysts, creating their own Power BI custom visuals has been far out of reach.
All that has changed with Analytic Solver V2017-R2. Working in Excel with this tool, a business analyst user can turn his or her Excel-based optimization or simulation model into a Power BI Custom Visual, with just a few mouse clicks. When loaded into Power BI, the result isn’t just a chart – it’s a fully-functional optimization or simulation model, ready to accept Power BI data, run on demand on the web, and display visual results in Power BI. Users simply drag and drop appropriate Power BI datasets into the “well” of inputs to match model parameters.
The Magic of RASON® -- RESTful Analytic Solver Object Notation
The secret behind the remarkable capability to turn desktop Excel models into web-based Power BI custom visuals, without any programming, is Analytic Solver's ability to translate an Excel model into RASON® (RESTful Analytic Solver Object Notation), Frontline's powerful modeling language embedded in JSON. (While not every model can be automatically translated, a wide array of simulation/risk analysis and linear and nonlinear optimization models can be.) Analytic Solver then “wraps” Power BI custom visual code around the RASON model. The result is a radically simple way to move from traditional Excel to cloud deployment to business intelligence "consumers" -- not available anywhere else.
Major Performance Gains for Large Optimization Models
For large optimization models with tens to hundreds of thousands of decision variables, the V2017-R2 release greatly improves the speed of "problem setup," where a "Jacobian matrix" is built from many thousands of Excel formulas. Though individual results vary, Frontline has seen speed gains of 10 to 50 times on real customer models. These improvements benefit all of Frontline's twelve different "Solver Engines" that handle problems ranging from linear programming and nonlinear optimization, to "arbitrary" models and stochastic optimization.
Also part of the V2017-R2 release are new, higher performance Solver Engines for optimization based on latest releases of the Gurobi Solver, FICO's Xpress Solver, and Artelys Knitro Solver, as well as Frontline’s greatly-enhanced, high-performance Evolutionary Solver, focused on challenging non-smooth, non-convex models with integer variables. Free trials of the optional large-scale Solver Engines are "built in" and available to users at any time.
New Simulation/Risk Analysis Functionality
The V2017-R2 release supports a new family of probability distributions, called the Metalog distributions, even more general than the Pearson distributions -- members of this family can be chosen based directly on historical data (even just a few observations), without a distribution fitting process. The Metalog distributions allow empirical data to "speak for itself" in simulation models.
Frontline's V2016-R2 release introduced Gaussian, Student and Archimedean copulas -- popular in quantitative finance -- to define correlation among uncertain variables with dissimilar distributions – complementing existing support for rank-order correlation. New in the V2017-R2 release is the ability to fit copula parameters to historical data – a complement to automatic distribution fitting sometimes called “correlation fitting.”
New Release Available Now, with Analytic Solver Basic
The new V2017-R2 release is available now at Frontline’s website Solver.com and at its cloud portal AnalyticSolver.com. In this release, Frontline is making available to all users Analytic Solver Basic --
a "starter edition" for just $250 per year that includes every feature of Frontline’s analytics software, but handles only limited-size models and datasets, suitable for learning. Paired with Solver Academy, Frontline's online learning platform, Analytic Solver Basic offers a way for business analysts to gain "advanced analytics ninja" skills.
Frontline Systems Inc. (http://www.solver.com) is the leader in analytics for spreadsheets and the web, helping managers gain insights and make better decisions for an uncertain future. Its products integrate forecasting and data mining for “predictive analytics,” Monte Carlo simulation and risk analysis, and conventional and stochastic optimization for “prescriptive analytics.” Founded in 1987, Frontline is based in Incline Village, Nevada (775-831-0300).
Excel® and Power BI® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. Knitro® is a registered trademark of Artelys/Ziena Optimization. Analytic Solver® and RASON® are registered trademarks of Frontline Systems, Inc.
Daniel Fylstra, Frontline Systems Inc., http://www.solver.com, (775) 831-0300, [email protected]
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