Proto Software

Our Mission

Proto's goal is to enable pervasive, data-driven decision making.

If you spend any time investigating the Business Intelligence space, you will discover a broad set of technologies that fit together to serve an even broader set of business needs. These needs generally pertain to capturing and using data to make better decisions. The BI space is complicated, the vocabulary is intimidating and full of acronyms, and the price of entry is steep. Realizing the significant rewards of a successful BI deployment requires expertise, a sizable budget and usually a little patience.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are millions of ordinary people who use Excel to sort pipelines, create simple formulas and develop fact based decisions entirely on their own. Often times, these people rely on a local Excel guru to write macros, build a database or work other magic to further improve their ability to make data-backed decisions. We think this local partnership works well, and further empowering the "Excel gurus" will help to unlock pervasive, powerful and cost effective business intelligence.

At Proto, we are focused on data analysis workflows. We think this is a shortcoming of Excel, Access and other tools. As the number of readily available data sources has increased, and the demand for analysis at all levels of an organization has become common place, more and more repetitive data analysis workflows are handled manually by end users. Excel is a perfect environment to weave data and analysis together, but quickly turns into a manual workbench when you have to run the same repetitive analysis on new data sets. Access keeps data structured, but lacks the analytical flexibility and interface to handle multi-step analysis processes. There isn't a great solution for users that need to carry out the same processes on new data sets, again and again.

Proto is designed to build clear, user friendly dashboards that walk people through all the analysis and data manipulation steps required to go from raw data to useful results. We believe technical individuals with domain knowledge can easily build these workflow tools for themselves, their colleagues and their clients. And we believe businesses that invest in streamlining and improving this organic, front-line analysis will realize an unbeatable near term ROI and a long term vision of pervasive, data-driven decision making.

Our History

Proto Software, Inc. was founded in 2003 with a vision for a new type of development platform that would allow end users to quickly build data analysis tools.

The background of Proto's founders and proximity to Wall Street made asset management firms a natural target for Proto. However the core technology was built to be generic, and Proto has been used for everything from CRM to derivatives analysis, right from the beginning.

During 2004 and 2005, Proto assembled a team of 13 top-notch engineers, and in October 2005 Proto launched with their first paid pilot site. Since then, Proto has released Proto Professional to the data analysts, consultants, internal IT teams, and independent solution developers who currently handle ad-hoc analysis needs with tools like Excel, Access and VBA.

Proto is a privately owned, venture backed company located in Midtown Manhattan.