With its move to Azure, River Logic, a Microsoft Gold Competency and Co-Sell Ready Partner, brings to market a platform that facilitates collaborative business planning, what-if scenario analysis, and trade-off decision management across all business functions. Azure is a growing collection of integrated cloud services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web—for moving faster, achieving more, and saving money.
Prescriptive analytics is a breakthrough form of advanced analytics that applies mathematics and algorithms to data and suggests a preferred course of action, rather than a forecast or a summary report. Thus, it is recognized as the most powerful form of advanced analytics (i.e., offering the highest ROI) when applied to collaborative business planning processes. River Logic's platform approach to providing prescriptive analytics enables the customers and partners the flexibility to rapidly configure solutions that deliver transformational value in a matter of weeks. Business users are thus empowered to make informed, optimal, and feasible decisions that drive benefits, like additional profit equal to 2-5 percent of annual revenue, improved operational performance, and increased decision-making agility.
"River Logic provides an enabling technology on Microsoft Azure that allows us to answer many of our clients' most important questions," said Simon Avenell, Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "This builds trust and allows authentic conversations with our customers, and it's in these relationships that the power of our firm can be brought to clients, unlocking unmatched value for their business."
River Logic has been a global leader in prescriptive analytics (specifically, optimization) since 2000. Rather than relying on suboptimal rules-based approaches or resource-intensive optimization engines, River Logic has developed a single platform that brings optimization-based collaborative planning to the business user. It enables cross-industry, enterprise-wide deployment of prescriptive analytics models and the associated collaborative planning processes. It's able to output optimal, feasible plans and provide full visibility into the "why" and "how" questions executives want answers to.
Further, users can leverage optimization on an ongoing basis to analyze and compare unlimited what-if scenarios in an innovative, user-friendly interface that directly indicates the financial impacts of their decisions. River Logic is used globally across dozens of industries and can solve unique problems for companies at almost any level of data and planning maturity. River Logic's product development vision focuses on the following key application aspects: outstanding user experience, rich application experience, meaningful and valuable functionality, and frequent product releases.
"We didn't want to be investing in developing base software infrastructure and worrying about deployment into different and varied IT environments," said Peter Bull, River Logic Chief Technology Officer. "At the same time, we needed to bring forward our existing (traditional) software products as critical pieces of our roadmap. The answer was to base the product roadmap on a cloud platform where Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) could be utilized to meet the goals for bringing together new application experiences within the existing product. Microsoft Azure and Cortana Intelligence Suite were exactly what we needed."
"By taking advantage of Cortana Intelligence Suite, River Logic is able to build on our Big Data, advanced analytics and AI cloud services to accelerate the creation of its advanced business planning platform that helps organizations make better business decisions based on 'what-if' scenarios and trade-off management," said Herain Oberoi, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft Azure at Microsoft Corp. "The addition of River Logic to our marketplace lets line-of-business executives, such as those in supply chain, finance and marketing, take advantage of predictive and prescriptive analytics to better align business strategies and operational functions."
River Logic's integration with Azure enables it to rapidly develop applications on local machines; deploy them to the cloud; and run performance, stress, and scale testing in the cloud. River Logic uses Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft R Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to gain insights and add value to prescriptive analytics. Continuous delivery provides code changes that can be deployed any time, and continuous deployment ensures every update that passes automated tests can be deployed automatically. Not only does Azure provide River Logic with the ability to rapidly prototype product capabilities and bring them to market faster, Azure and Microsoft Power BI help River Logic solve complex, data-intensive problems while giving end users the ability to visualize the results.