Frontline Systems was recently recognized as a Sample Vendor in the Gartner Hype Cycle™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence, 2023; Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2023; Hype Cycle for Data Science and Machine Learning, 2023; Hype Cycle for Legal and Compliance Technologies, 2023; and Hype Cycle for Digital Government Services, 2023.

“Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Gartner Hype Cycle methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.”*

One finding that we find noteworthy from the five Hype Cycle reports is that Gartner rates Prescriptive Analytics in the “Adolescent” maturity stage. We believe this is consistent with Frontline’s view of the market, based on its experience supporting the efforts of more than a thousand large enterprise customers:  After years (in many cases) of experimentation and learning, enterprises are ready to exploit Prescriptive Analytics methods on a larger scale in the next 2-5 years.

As noted in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Analytics and Business Intelligence, 2023: “Prescriptive analytics capabilities either automate or augment decision making to improve business responsiveness and outcomes.” “Such components include optimization, rules combined with predictive techniques, and decision intelligence. The increasing focus on composite AI is further propelling the importance of prescriptive analytics." In the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2023 and Hype Cycle for Data Science and Machine Learning, 2023 report, Frontline Systems is recognized as a Sample Vendor for Composite AI use case.

Frontline Systems offers deep support for the full range of Prescriptive Analytics methods in three major products:  Analytic Solver® for Microsoft Excel users, Solver SDK® for developers, and RASON®, Frontline’s cloud platform that enables professional developers, “citizen” developers using “low-code/no-code” tools such as Power Automate, and business analysts using Excel to easily work together to create, deploy and manage decision intelligence models.

Frontline’s deep support includes powerful linear, mixed-integer, nonlinear and evolutionary optimization methods; advanced business rules and decision tables using the DMN (Decision Model and Notation) open standard; Monte Carlo simulation and risk analysis, with extensions to find best risk-managed solutions; tools to train, validate and apply machine learning and other predictive models to numeric and textual data; and tools to define and run multi-stage workflows of all of these predictive and prescriptive methods.  

In their latest releases, Frontline’s tools include an AI Agent, “pre-trained” to answer user questions on both predictive and prescriptive analytics. These tools have helped make prescriptive analytics more actionable and widely used by business leaders who need to make complex resource allocation decisions, taking to account both uncertain factors in their environment and constraints on resource availability. 

Prescriptive analytics can help business leaders create models of their present and future business situations. Using these models, businesses can then have a clearer view of possible outcomes of allocating resources and making decisions, such as how to assign a marketing budget or how to manage inventory, while mitigating risks and costs.

Using optimization – often considered an “AI method” in its own right – businesses can find the best or optimal way to use their resources. Human modelers simply state the constraints and other conditions that the outcome must satisfy – the optimization algorithms search through billions of possible solutions in thousands of dimensions, to find the best possible solution.   

According to the Gartner report, prescriptive analytics techniques support the following business impacts:

  • “Strategic, tactical and operational decisions to reduce risk, maximize profits, minimize costs, or more efficiently allocate scarce or competing resources
  • Recommendations for a course of action that best manages the trade-offs among conflicting constraints and goals
  • Exploration of multiple scenarios and comparison of recommended courses of action
  • Strategic and tactical time horizons as well as real-time or near-real-time decision making"

Frontline Systems is pleased to be mentioned as a Sample Vendor for Prescriptive Analytics.  We agree that this category still has significant room to grow, mature, and achieve widespread adoption. 

Prescriptive Analytics is already helping business leaders to make better-informed decisions to navigate uncertainty in a wide range of situations and use cases. For many vendors, Prescriptive Analytics is a new set of capabilities, to be added to “business intelligence” or “data science” platforms. But for Frontline Systems, Prescriptive Analytics is “part of our DNA”, robust and proven in use, fully integrated with our own data science and machine learning tools, with single-button-click integration into popular tools like Microsoft Teams, Power BI and Tableau. Frontline is looking forward to seeing continued growth and development of these capabilities and how they can be implemented to unlock business value.  

Only Gartner members can access the full reports (For Gartner subscribers only):

*Gartner Methodology, Gartner Hype Cycle

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.