River Logic Customers and Partners Gain Huge Architectural Benefits from Service Fabric

River Logic’s strength is in prescriptive analytics-based optimization. The company has over 1,100 person-years of experience in building 100’s of models that solve complex business problems across dozens of industries. Two years ago River Logic made the decision to move to Microsoft Azure, which significantly helped the company maintain a modern architecture that is quickly scalable. As our readers know, Power BI is embedded within the River Logic’s solution, enabling world-class visualization of prescriptive analytics data.

As a natural evolution of its architecture, River Logic is proud to announce the release of its scenario management and visualization solution on the latest Microsoft Azure Service Fabric. Azure Service Fabric is a platform that simplifies the building and deploying of microservice-based applications. It allows River Logic to focus on building features that add business value. Additionally, Service Fabric understands the available infrastructure and the resource needs of applications, enabling automatic scale, rolling upgrades, and self-healing from faults.

Azure Service Fabric

What does this mean for our customers and partners?

  1. Service Fabric provides a very efficient and effective approach for delivering rolling releases and updates for new features. As well as, functionality and updates including agile responses to customer requests
  2. With Service Fabric, River Logic can scale rapidly, automatically and economically as demand increases on the system. The provides a tremendous capability to run numerous scenarios and highly performant optimization solves
  3. Being 100% architected on Azure Identity Management and associated Azure security and compliance capabilities, River Logic provides a highly secure and trusted application experience for organizations and users
  4. River Logic already provides a fully embedded Power BI experience. Alongside this Microsoft Azure and Service Fabric, other valuable services are provided that can be readily integrated with River Logic. This includes other advanced analytics such as cognitive and machine learning capabilities, Data Factory…

Excel-like User Experience for the Analyst

Prescriptive analytics is unique, as compared to other forms of analytics in that the input data and output data are interchangeable. Decision variables can be constraints and vice versa. So, it is highly critical that the analyst has full visibility to input data in both detailed, as well as aggregate formats.

River Logic has added a major enhancement that enables users to rapidly modify the input data of decision models through cloud-based, Excel-like forms. In order to enable this capability, we are leveraging the leading Javascript-based spreadsheet control, SpreadJS. This will allow analysts to work with input data (including master data as well as scenario specific data) to help them save hours of time.

  • Analysts can now author their own input forms using a spreadsheet designer
  • Analysts can format cells exactly the way they want using features such as fonts, alignment, merging, borders, and shading
  • Analysts can apply data-type formatting of any kind, such as simple currency conversions to cell
  • Analysts can embed any Excel formula to cells and apply statistical functions to them
  • Both the people who author the forms and the analysts who populate input data have the comfort of using a complete Excel-like user experience
  • The solution can scale to 1,000’s of rows with very high performance in even low to medium bandwidth environments
Input Levers Example
Figure 1. An example of River Logic's new Excel-like input forms. In the above example, ten forms have been created in order to quickly modify underlying scenario assumptions.

Benefits to customers and partners:

This quality will allow analysts to augment the existing capabilities already available within River Logic’s cloud experience — like levers — with the free-form input capabilities that resemble Excel. Looking forward, River Logic will soon be able to augment this existing functionality in order to add charting, Excel downloads/uploads, pivoting, and more. This will allow analysts the ability to interact with input data at a very granular level. They will also be able to run comprehensive scenarios that reflects the real business situations that exist in their organization, as opposed to running high-level scenarios that are based on aggregate assumptions.

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