Decisioneering Company History

The mission of Oracle's Crystal Ball Global Business Unit (formerly Decisioneering, Inc.) is to be the most widely used provider of risk-analysis tools, applications and services. We are dedicated to developing the tools, services, and training that individuals and companies need to better calculate, communicate and diminish their business risks.

The Crystal Ball Line of Products

In 1986, Decisioneering's founders recognized that the newly available spreadsheet programs, while popular and useful, were poor tools for addressing risk and probability. To address the need for a sophisticated but easy-to-use simulation program, the company designed and marketed its first software product, Crystal Ball. At the time, when Monte Carlo techniques were less well known to the general public, Crystal Ball represented an important advance in the way spreadsheets and computers could be used to forecast risk.

Since then, Crystal Ball has continued to change the way that analysts, engineers, managers and other professionals make critical business decisions. With its innovative charts, reports and simulation technology, Crystal Ball helps all levels of spreadsheet modelers calculate and clearly communicate the certainty of a desired outcome. Major industries that have adopted Crystal Ball include oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, aerospace, transportation, and chemicals for such diverse applications as Six Sigma, reserve analysis, financial valuation, environmental and waste assessment, market evaluation, portfolio planning and sales forecasting.

In 1998, Decisioneering introduced Crystal Ball Pro (later to become Crystal Ball Professional Edition), the first desktop software suite to combine the technologies of Monte Carlo simulation and global optimization. Crystal Ball Pro was hailed as a breakthrough product and received several awards and nominations. In the same year, Decisioneering released two other hallmark products: CB Turbo, which enhances the speed of Crystal Ball through distributed processing, and CB Predictor, the first time-series forecasting software integrated with a Monte Carlo simulation package. In mid-1999, we took another pioneering step by creating Open Crystal Ball (OCB), a platform-independent version of our Monte Carlo simulation and optimization tools for software developers.

A Company Focused on Growth

In the past decade, as demand for risk analysis products and services increased, the privately held Decisioneering experienced record growth and income. For the past nine years, Decisioneering was ranked by Deloitte & Touche as one of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in Colorado. Our analytic engines are currently in use at over 85% of Fortune 500 companies and in all of the top 50 MBA programs in the US. Our Academic Outreach Program includes over 500 international schools that use our software tools for instruction and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

In January 2000, we answered the international demand for decision intelligence tools by opening our first overseas office, Decisioneering (UK), Ltd. Based in London, Decisioneering (UK) has helped us to improve the speed of service and quality of support for our European, Middle Eastern and African customers. In addition, our network of distributor and reseller partnerships has brought Crystal Ball to new countries and markets throughout the globe, including Tokyo, where our distributor partner, Kozo Engineering has developed a Japanese-language version of Crystal Ball. In April, 2004, we founded Decisioneering Europe GmbH, located in Frankfurt, Germany, to provide sales and product support to our partners and customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

We have also worked to develop strategic partners in consulting, publishing, training and marketing. Consulting partners such as Decision Strategies and Sigma Breakthrough Technologies, Inc. (SBTI) include Crystal Ball training and modeling as a standard component of their training and consulting practices. Other companies like Bancware, CCH, Landmark, SRC and Dataskill integrate or package our simulation and optimization products with their own software and services. To extend our reach to students and professionals, we have joined with top-tier publishers such as Wiley and South-Western to include versions of our software in over 20 textbooks in fields as diverse as operations management, engineering and environmental science.

An Emphasis on Risk Analysis Training

Decisioneering introduced its first live training course for Crystal Ball in 1997. As of June 1, 2008, Oracle University is pleased to offer CRystal Ball trainng classes.

A Dramatic Increase in Speed

With the release of Crystal Ball 7 in March 2005, Decisioneering gave users the ability to run simulations up to 100 times faster than normal in Extreme Speed mode. The latest version of the award-winning software gives users unprecedented speed increases in Crystal Ball simulations and optimizations. Extreme Speed allows customers running Crystal Ball Professional Edition a greater ability to transform Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into dynamic models that solve almost any problem where uncertainty and variability distort spreadsheet forecasts.

Crystal Ball 7 also includes new features that extend the ability of the software with scalable methods for sharing information, improved statistical modeling capabilities and new analysis and reporting tools.

Oracle and Crystal Ball

The success of Crystal Ball did not go unnoticed. In Early 2007, Decisioneering, Inc. was acquired by Business Performance Management leader Hyperion. Shortly thereafter, Hyperion was acquired by Oracle Corp., the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. Oracle understands the value that Crystal Ball brings to users around the world and has thrown its support behind Crystal Ball and the newly formed Crystal Ball Global Business Unit (GBU) of Oracle.

What Does the Future Hold?

We expect our company's growth to continue as new markets and regions embrace the concepts of risk analysis, forecasting and simulation. "From Design for Six Sigma to Cost Analysis, the first step to making better decisions is understanding the risk. Our goal is to give companies the language and the tools to communicate risk throughout their organization," said James Franklin, General Manager of Oracle's Crystal Ball GBU. As companies face the difficult prospect of downsizing, the globalization of markets and intense competition, our products will continue to provide them with better ways to address risk and identify opportunities.

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