Frontline’s Chief Architect, Darrell Burns, has been in the information management business in one form or another since the 1970s. At various times in his career, Darrell has been a programmer, a consultant, a sales rep, an entrepreneur, and an executive. He has designed and/or built and/or consulted on systems for steel mill process control, accounting, econometric modeling, portfolio management, customer and marketing databases, construction management, case management, data warehouses, geo-demographics, locational analysis, watch-list screening and most recently, import classification. In those capacities, he has worked with hundreds of companies, large and small, in every imaginable industry, all over the U.S. and overseas. This multi-faceted experience, combined with an innate passion for problem-solving, has endowed Darrell with a keen sense for unraveling complex business processes and devising creative data-driven solutions.

Frontline has a partner network of talented specialists in database engineering, software engineering, web applications, UI design, hosting, QA, project management, and various software development technologies.

History

Frontline Data Architects originated in 1992 as Frontline Systems, Inc. in Pittsburgh,

About Us

PA by Darrell Burns.  During its first 6 years, Frontline specialized in building custom desktop applications in Paradox^® and later in Microsoft Access^®.  Darrell turned Frontline over to his partner, Pratt Harris, in 1998 after

being recruited to San Diego in 1998 to take a position as head of Applied Technologies with leading geo-demographics company Claritas (now Nielsen Claritas).  Pratt continues to maintain the Pittsburgh office and data center.

In 1999, while at Claritas, Darrell and Pratt designed and created a software product for standardizing and merging business name/address data, called BizMerge, which was sold as part of Claritas’s B2B services.  In 2000, Darrell was appointed Claritas’s CIO and oversaw development of an enterprise-wide data warehouse and metadata management system for managing the company’s broad set of data products.  In 2003, Darrell conceived and initiated design of a web-enabled system for site location analysis based on Oracle’s spatial data engine, which later evolved into a standard Claritas product.  In 2005, Darrell initiated a service for Claritas which developed marketing databases, using BizMerge, for large financial, telecom, and retail clients.

In 2007, after leaving Claritas, Darrell began work on a design framework for creating classification systems – ClassifyIt -- which has been used as the basis for an import classification product.  ClassifyIt was developed in Microsoft Access^® with a SQL Server^® back-end.  A web front-end is currently under development.

Prior to founding Frontline Systems, Darrell’s career included positions as a systems designer at U.S. Steel, as a consultant at Ernst & Young, as a consultant at Interactive Data Corp, and as a consultant with Innovative Systems Inc.  Darrell graduated with a Masters in Industrial Management from Clarkson University and later earned a CPA license from Pennsylvania.