Altair Monarch (formerly Datawatch Monarch, acquired by Altair in December, 2018) works with both relational and multi-structured data including support for a wide range of formats including PDF, XML, HTML, text, spool and ASCII files. The product can access data from invoices, sales reports, balance sheets, customer lists, inventory, logs and more. According to the vendor, the system is easy to use, allowing users to quickly select any data source and automatically convert it into…
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Analytic Solver
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Frontline Systems Analytic Solver is an Excel add-on for performing data mining, and predictive analytics from within Microsoft Excel.
The product is especially useful when you have real-time and/or time series data to analyze. If you have more mundane, simpler requirements, other products might do the job you need for less money (there are even some decent open source visualization tools you can find.) I know the product is very widely used in capital markets applications to monitor and analyze risk and price and volume changes; if you're working in that area, I don't think there's a better tool to use.
Based on my limited experience and use, and therefore limited global knowledge of the software, I would recommend it especially if the data that will be used as inputs to the model has previously worked on a spreadsheet such as Excel. I would also recommend it to analyze problems of medium and small size. Given the experience I have had when I have used it with large problems, there have been noticeable decreases in the speed of response (which are not associated with the size of the system of equations involved in the calculation). Excellent for processing linear programming models.
Creating a basic model to extract data from a report is very easy.
Advanced features like Calculated Fields and External Lookups allow you to augment the raw data.
You can create a "project" to automate the data extraction. Combined with Datapump (a separate DW app), you can fully automate the process once the raw report is generated.
Recently, we had some major sticker-shock when we wanted to upgrade Data Pump. It is an exceptional product, but when the price jumped from $6,000 to over $60,000, it was impossible to get the funds approved internally for the upgrade.
We also paid for yearly maintenance contracts which included Professional Services, but rarely found those services beneficial. However, we did receive all software upgrades for Datapump as part of the contract which we found to be very beneficial. However, with the new pricing, that is not longer the case.
On the few occasions when I have used it to deal with problems of optimization of relatively large parameters (with a large number of restrictions and decision variables), the program has been slower, not substantially but slower, than programs such as the WinQsb, even when the latter runs on 32-bit machines and not 64. That has caught my attention, even though it is not a real problem for the uses I give to the program.
Given my partial function as a university professor, it has been much more effective and practical to use other software, due to the limited options that the educational license associated with the software has.
Datawatch is very good value of money compared to QlikView; QlikView is really more of a BI tool and has a lot of functions that I didn't need. Datawatch is very strong in the real-time area where Tableau, Panorama, and Qlik don't do very well. If you need to set up a visual monitoring dashboard, Datawatch is the best product I've seen for that. if you want to do a lot of in depth statistical analysis of large databases, Tableau is probably a good option.
We believe in building the models in Excel. A limitation with Excel is that Excel Solver can not take more than 200 decision variables with multiple constraints. It is cheap in terms of license and maintenance fees against other softwares which are available in the market.
- It has allowed finding ways to optimize (minimizing costs or times) the field processes involved in various projects.
It has even allowed, in specific cases where it was used for that purpose, to optimize the allocation of resources (people) to work in different jobs that present weekly variations of the activity that these people must perform.
It has allowed the sensitivity analysis of projects to changes in the decision variables related to them, which, and in very dynamic and changing environments, resulted in substantial decreases in money losses.
