About OptTek
We solve complex challenges through optimization and analytics.
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OptTek is the world’s leader in complex systems optimization, serving a wide range of clients and partners in the public and private sectors including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and branches of the U.S. military.
Our two primary business units include OptQuest, our proprietary optimization software; and Government Solutions, which serves the specialized needs of U.S. governmental agencies and the military.
Is OptTek Right For Your Organization?
- Complex challenges to address
- Complex systems that would benefit from optimization
- Want to make better data-driven strategic, process and workforce decisions based on highly reliable, state-of-the-art techniques and tools
- Cannot test theories and ideas in the real-world but still want to make optimal decisions based on highly reliable, state-of-the-art techniques and tools
- Develop simulation solutions and want to add the power of optimization to them
- Currently use simulation modeling to make crucial decisions
Our Team
OptTek is home to some of the most talented men and women in the fields of analytics, data science, statistics, commercial software development, and computer modeling among others. Thanks to their boundless intelligence and dedication, the OptTek team is able to solve even the most complex challenges our clients face.
James Kelly, PH.D.
Benjamin Thengvall, PH.D.
Deborah Kelly, J.D.
Jose Ramirez, PH.D.
Joshua Snyder
Join the Team
Begin your journey to make the world a better and safer place with a career at OptTek.
Our History
Opportunity Knocks
In the early 1990s, three University of Colorado professors—James Kelly, Manuel Laguna and Fred Glover—were blending their diverse backgrounds and expertise in mathematics, engineering and artificial intelligence to pioneer the development of new methods for complex optimization models.
Although a few academics and practitioners had noted the importance of solving optimization problems by simulating real-world systems, no practical methods or computer software existed that could handle such problems.
In search of a solution, Decisioneering (which later became part Oracle) learned of Kelly, Laguna and Glover—and the cutting-edge work they were doing in the field of optimization—and reached out to them.
Simulation Meets Optimization
Kelly, Laguna and Glover immediately recognized the vital importance of a method to optimize problems modeled by simulation. It would open the door to an enormous range of real-world applications that had long been considered inaccessible.
This was the birth of OptTek Systems, Inc. and the OptQuest optimization system, the company’s first core software technology.
The Evolution of a Leader
Concurrent with the growth of OptQuest, OptTek began exploring new ways to expand the range of its applications. OptTek’s first large project in a new sector, the government space, came in 2003 with the U.S. Strategic Command’s Integrated Strategic Planning and Analysis Network (ISPAN) Program. OptTek was selected as a member of a team led by Lockheed Martin that was awarded a 10-year, $213 million contract by the U.S. Strategic Command to remodel and enhance their mission planning and execution systems. OptTek’s role was for design and delivery of all optimization capabilities as related to this project.
Since its entry into the government sector, OptTek’s Government Solutions business unit has become a recognized leader for providing optimization and other custom solutions to numerous branches of the Department of Defense and related entities.
Workforce Planning Gets Optimized
With the help of an NSF grant, the OptTek team leveraged its knowledge of simulation optimization to develop OptForce, a state-of-the-art workforce planning solution. Launched in 2005, OptForce uses patented agent-based simulation and optimization modeling technology and highly sophisticated predictive analytics techniques to produce actionable workforce intelligence.
Demand for this offering has grown steadily, with OptForce currently in use by organizations that conduct planning for workforces in excess of 750,000 employees.
Today's OptTek
The leading supplier of optimization software to the simulation industry. A trusted solutions provider to the government sector.
Despite these world-class accomplishments and many more, OptTek remains a small and tightly knit organization run out of its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.
What Makes OptTek Unique?
Advanced Problem-Solving
We are able to solve the most complex challenges and optimize highly complex systems thanks to our expertise and extensive experience in powerful techniques such as simulation modeling, statistical analysis, metaheuristics optimization, evolutionary algorithms, and tabu search and scatter search, among others. We solve challenges that are beyond most traditional tools and approaches.
Wide Ranging Challenges Solved
Whether our clients face strategic, process or workforce-related challenges, OptTek’s powerful problem-solving and analytical techniques deliver the most reliable insights and outcomes—even when these challenges have many competing objectives. We’re able to balance all of these objectives to present the best possible solutions.
Wide Ranging Challenges Solved
Whether our clients face strategic, process or workforce-related challenges, OptTek’s powerful problem-solving and analytical techniques deliver the most reliable insights and outcomes—even when these challenges have many competing objectives. We’re able to balance all of these objectives to present the best possible solutions.
World-Class Optimization
OptTek Systems helps clients arrive at the best possible solutions whether they want to configure a complex system more effectively, make better data-driven decisions or improve the results of their simulation modeling, even when we’re working with limited or imperfect information.
What can OptTek do for you?
Solving the world's most complex challenges through optimization and analytics for over 30 years.