Bortz Media Uses FICO Optimization Software to Create Season Schedules for Major Professional and College Leagues

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 18, 2014 —FICO (NYSE:FICO), a leading predictive analytics and decision management software company, today announced that Bortz Media & Sports Group is using FICO^® Xpress Optimization Suite to produce season schedules for professional, collegiate and recreational baseball, football, basketball, hockey and tennis leagues.

Sports scheduling is a complex business involving variables such as venue availability, fairness, league rules, sponsorships and advertising, TV schedules and fan attendance. Scheduling games for a single season can involve literally trillions of scheduling permutations with thousands of variables and constraints. A leader in media, sports and entertainment planning and advisory services, Bortz Media is using FICO Xpress Optimization Suite to mathematically model and find the best scheduling permutations, including accommodating stadium availability, minimizing the competitive impact of travel and days between games, selecting the best dates for games, and maximizing television viewership.

“We work with a variety of sports clients on a myriad of complex scheduling requirements and constraints that must be taken into account each season,” said Arthur Steiker, managing director at Bortz Media. “FICO Xpress helps us not only meet each client’s unique requirements but also speeds up the scheduling process, and ensure outstanding schedules for fans, teams, sponsors and broadcast partners.”

“Major league sports schedules entail notoriously difficult mathematical problems,” said Stuart Wells, chief technology officer at FICO. “This is the kind of challenge that FICO Xpress was built to handle. Bortz Media is a leader in the market, and the work it has done with its clients and our software is extremely impressive. Between Bortz’s clients and other FICO clients, FICO’s analytics are driving the decisions about who plays whom, when and where, for most of the major professional games played in the U.S.”

Part of the FICO^® Decision Management Platform, FICO^® Xpress Optimization Suite is the premier mathematical optimization software for modeling and solving massively complex problems. It was the first optimization software with 64-bit ultra-large-scale optimization for solving massive problems, and version 7,5 makes it easier than ever to use distributed, cloud-based optimization services to crunch the numbers. FICO Xpress is also the optimization engine inside FICO solutions such as FICO^® Decision Optimizer and FICO^® Analytic Offer Manager.

Sobre FICO
FICO (NYSE: FICO) es una empresa líder de software de analítica que ayuda a negocios de más de 80 países a tomar mejores decisiones que incrementen el crecimiento, la rentabilidad y la satisfacción del cliente. El innovador uso de Big Data y de algoritmos matemáticos por parte de la empresa para predecir el comportamiento del consumidor ha transformado sectores enteros. FICO ofrece software de analítica y herramientas que se emplean en múltiples sectores para gestionar riesgos, combatir el fraude, crear relaciones con clientes más rentables, optimizar operaciones y cumplir con estrictas regulaciones gubernamentales. Many of our products reach industry-wide adoption — such as the FICO^® Score, the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the United States. Las soluciones FICO emplea estándares de código abierto y cloud computing para maximizar la flexibilidad, hacer despliegues más rápidos y reducir costes. La empresa también ayuda a millones de personas a gestionar su salud crediticia personal. FICO: Make every decision count™. Learn more at www.fico.com.

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