Frontline Systems Corporate Backgrounder - Products and Competition

Contact Information: Dan Fylstra, Frontline Systems press@solver.com Tel 775-831-0300 x120  Fax 775-831-0314

• Company Overview
• Market Niche
• Products
• Competition
• Ownership/Management
• Current Strategy

Products

Frontline Systems offers three principal product lines:  The Premium Solver products -- Solvers for optimization in Excel, the Risk Solver products -- Solvers for simulation in Excel, and the Solver SDK products -- Solvers for user-written simulation and optimization in custom applications.

Frontline's Premium Solver Platform is 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 far 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 its new Stochastic Edition supports the full gamut of robust optimization, stochastic programming, and simulation optimization methods for decision models with uncertainty.

Frontline's Risk Solver breaks new ground in speed, power, and ease of use in spreadsheet simulation.  Designed from the ground up for the power of modern PCs and Excel 2007, it's the first new "industrial strength" risk analysis tool for Excel to appear in 15 years.  Risk Solver is the only product to offer instant, interactive risk analysis, with updated charts and statistics on each change to a user's model.  It's the first product with full support for the emerging practice of Probability Management in large companies.  It offers by far the highest performance simulation optimization in Excel, and it's the only product that includes a runtime package, Risk Solver Engine, that simplifies deployment of risk analysis applications to end users.

Frontline's Solver Platform SDK makes the company's full suite of Solvers for every type and size of optimization problem available to developers who are using today's most popular platforms and languages: Microsoft COM and .NET, Java and MATLAB, as well as C/C++, Visual Basic and other languages.  Unlike other products, the SDK features easy-to-use Wizards to help developers get started quickly, IntelliSense and balloon Help, and a new object-oriented API that enables developers to work at a higher level.  It can be used to develop Intranet / Web servers and Web Services as well as desktop applications.

To solve very large and challenging optimization problems, Frontline offers several Solver Engines that "plug into" the Premium Solver Platform and the Solver Platform SDK. These include the Large-Scale LP/QP Solver and XPRESS Solver for linear and mixed-integer problems, the MOSEK Solver for convex and conic optimization problems, the Large-Scale GRG Solver, Large-Scale SQP Solver, and KNITRO Solver for nonlinear problems, and the OptQuest Solver for challenging non-smooth problems.

Competition

With its position as developer of the Solvers embedded in all three major spreadsheet products -- Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro -- and as supplier of the software bundled in more than twenty leading textbooks used to teach undergraduate business and MBA students about optimization, Frontline Systems is far and away the leader in spreadsheet optimization software.

Frontline is a newcomer to the market for spreadsheet simulation software -- introducing its first Risk Solver Engine product in October 2006, and its flagship Risk Solver product in April 2007.  This market has seen many entrants over 15 years, but the main players have been Decisioneering Inc. with its Crystal Ball product, and Palisade Corp. with its @RISK for Excel.  Frontline has quickly become the third major player in risk analysis for Excel, as well as the technology leader -- virtually "reinventing" risk analysis in spreadsheets with its Interactive Simulation approach.  Moving beyond simple risk analysis, Frontline has become the technology and market leader in software to optimize models with risk and uncertainty, with Risk Solver and Premium Solver Platform Stochastic Edition.

With its Solver Platform SDK and Solver Engines, Frontline competes in the general optimization software market.  In software for linear and mixed-integer linear programming, Frontline has dozens of competitors, from IBM and ILOG Inc. to numerous smaller firms -- but Frontline is widely viewed as one of the leading software vendors.  In nonlinear optimization software, there are few established suppliers, and Frontline is clearly a leading competitor.  In convex and conic optimization software, Frontline also has the leading software offerings.  In software for global and nonsmooth optimization, Frontline believes it is the leading competitor, with the most complete and highest performance products that continue to advance the state of the art.

Next: Ownership/Management >

< Back to Analysts and Press Start Here

To Learn More: For instant access to our white papers, example models, full-text User Guides, and to download free 15-day trial versions of our software products whenever you're ready, register now with no obligation.

User type Please Select Commercial User Consultant Corp Developer Govt/Military Professor Student VAR/ISV Firm Email address Name First Last Company University Phone

Trial version passwords are sent to the above email address. Our Privacy Policy protects you.