InterSystems

Last Updated: 1st September 2023
Analyst Coverage: David Norfolk, Daniel Howard and Paul Bevan

InterSystems Corporation is a privately-owned company that was founded in the USA in 1978 and it opened its first office in the UK in 1986. Revenues were nearly $700 million in 2018. Apart from North America, it has over 35 global office locations throughout Europe (including Russia and Israel), across both South America and South East Asia, and in Australia, South Africa and the Gulf. It also has distributors around the globe – InterSystems software is in use in over 80 countries worldwide.

Phillip T. (Terry) Ragon, InterSystems CEO and founder still has a very hands-on approach to his company. In part, this seems to be why InterSystems as good as it is at punching above its weight, but it is also very choosy about who it employs – technical excellence is just the start, and passion, ethics etc also matter. The importance of Ragon might imply a possible succession issue but the InterSystems management team seems to be well aware of this and tells me that it is given a lot of autonomy and is strong enough to survive Ragon leaving. Not unconnected with its popularity with the people who have actually heard of it, InterSystems also strikes us as a company that genuinely takes people issues and ethics seriously. It claims to be guided by the IRIS principle—that software should be Interoperable, Reliable, Intuitive, and Scalable.

Historically the company has largely relied on implementation partners and ISVs for its sales, with a relatively small direct sales force. While the company’s partner base remains a major strength InterSystems has also expanded its direct sales force to support large corporations that require a direct relationship and because of the HealthShare and TrakCare solutions, which provide healthcare applications for the US (HealthShare) and elsewhere (TrakCare).

We see InterSystems as focusing on specific vertical markets, which allows it to make the best use of its limited marketing resources. It invests heavily in improving its technology platform, which has a very sound basis and is often almost the only choice where ultimate scalability and performance are needed. For example, it is used to map over 1 billion stars in the Milky Way for the European Space Agency and processes more than 300,000 transactions per day for the 2nd largest shipping company in the world.

However, InterSystems is not resting on its technical laurels and its IRIS platform provides considerable “value add” services for integration, analytics and “augmented intelligence” (AI). As an example of how it is prepared to open up to new developers, it has recently announced support for Python as a “first class” language for InterSystems development. It also supports an impressive “Knowledge Hub”, with an online community, blogs, educational resources and certification programs. It is very much more than just a database with add-ons, it is a genuine data platform.

Company Info

Headquarters: One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
Telephone: +1 617 621 0600

Caché

Last Updated: 7th March 2013

What it does

We have no doubt that Caché offers better performance both for the developer and in production than comparable systems from much more well-known vendors and, indeed, the same would apply if you compared Caché with many environments that you not think of as being comparable. While these benefits are accentuated in complex application environments they actually apply to any and all sectors.

Let us be clear, Caché can do what conventional transactional databases can do, only better. Not only that, it can support operational business intelligence at the same time, or master data management or complex event processing. We don't know of any other database, anywhere, that can make those claims in a credible manner. Of course, Caché is not just a database but also a development environment and it wouldn't be what it is as a database if it wasn't for the development tooling, and the latter wouldn't be as flexible and powerful as it is without the database. We are big fans: you should go and look at Caché.

Markets and channels

While InterSystems has customers in all vertical sectors, the company has a particular focus on healthcare and financial services. For example, Ensemble (remember that Ensemble is effectively a layer implemented on top of Caché) has a dominant position in the UK's National Health Service. However, looking forward, InterSystems has the potential to be a significant player in areas such as social media analysis (because of iKnow), smart metering and other machine-to-machine environments.

Users

Users of Caché specifically, as opposed to any other products, include Press Computer Systems (PCS), Epic Systems, The Belgian Police, BNP Paribas, Epic Systems, The European Space Agency (this is a 'big data' implementation), IBM, Johns Hopkins, Optalert (a sensor-based 'breakthrough application'), SPAR, TD Ameritrade, Whitbread and many others.

Technology

Caché is the company's database and development environment which acts as the basis for all of the company's other products: InterSystems Ensemble (a platform for connected applications), InterSystems HealthShare and InterSystems TrakCare (specialised solutions for the healthcare sector, DeepSee (for embedding analytics into operational applications) and iKnow (which offers a text analytics capability). DeepSee and iKnow (which can run together) are collectively known as Active Analytics.

Caché, which was first introduced in 1997, is available to run under HP-UX, AIX, HP Tru64 UNIX, HP OpenVMS, Sun Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows (various versions) and the Apple Macintosh. In modern parlance the product is a NoSQL database though, of course, the product existed long before anyone came up with the term.

Caché is, on the one hand, a database and, on the other, a rapid application development environment. As a database the product uses a multi-dimensional storage engine. This means that if you want to use it for relational tables then you can do so, because a table is just a two-dimensional array. Alternatively, the engine supports an object-oriented approach (with no impedance mismatch) that allows you to store business objects, customers or patients, for example, as complete entities without having to disperse this information across multiple tables with all the complications of referential integrity that you would require when using a relational approach. There is a free-to-download version of Caché that provides just the storage engine.

As a development environment you can continue to use a relational paradigm if you wish, for the environment supports SQL as well as a wide range of popular programming languages. However, there are also Caché-specific development capabilities that take advantage of tight integration with the database to provide superior performance. In some cases this integration has also been extended to standard languages such as Java. Note that you are not limited to any particular choice: it is common, for example, for Caché developers to use InterSystems' provided capabilities for some purposes but still use SQL for reporting, say.

Services

InterSystems offers a worldwide central response centre as well as local support and individual support groups for each of its main product lines. The company also provides a specialised portal on its web site for developers as well as a formal education and training programme. There is also a campus programme for students and faculty.

GlobalsDB

Last Updated: 10th February 2015

What it does

Globals DB is a NoSQL Database offering by InterSystems. It is free to download. It exposes the multi-dimensional data engine that lies at the core of the company's commercial product Caché. It can be deployed as a document store, a key value store or as a graph database. In the latter category it can act as a true graph database with index-free adjacency (that is, nodes point to adjacent nodes without the need for indexing). In theory, because of the multi-model nature of the engine you could also deploy GlobalsDB as a triple store or RDF database if you preferred.

Markets and channels

As a free product the intention behind GlobalsDB is to encourage a broader community of users and developers that are familiar with InterSystems' technology, that will/may in due course wish to adopt the full Caché product.

InterSystems has customers in all vertical sectors, though the company has a particular focus on healthcare and financial services. Looking forward, InterSystems has the potential to be a significant player in areas such as social media analysis, smart metering and other machine-to-machine environments (the Internet of Things).

Users

There are no case studies or user details on the GlobalsDB website. However, users of Caché specifically, as opposed to any other InterSystems' products, include Press Computer Systems (PCS), Epic Systems, The Belgian Police, BNP Paribas, The European Space Agency (this is a 'big data' implementation), IBM, Johns Hopkins, Optalert (a sensor-based 'breakthrough application'), SPAR, TD Ameritrade, Whitbread and many others.

Technology

Caché is the company's database and development environment which acts as the basis for all of the company's other products, while GlobalsDB is the database engine inside Caché.

Caché (and therefore GlobalsDB), which was first introduced in 1997, is available to run under HP-UX, AIX, HP Tru64 UNIX, HP OpenVMS, Sun Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows (various versions) and the Apple Macintosh. In modern parlance the product is a NoSQL database though, of course, the product existed long before anyone came up with the term.

As a database GlobalsDB uses a multi-dimensional storage engine. This means that if you want to use it for relational tables then you can do so, because a table is just a two-dimensional array. Alternatively, the engine supports an object-oriented approach (with no impedance mismatch) that allows you to store business objects, customers or patients, for example, as complete entities without having to disperse this information across multiple tables with all the complications of referential integrity that you would require when using a relational approach. Similarly, you can build your own NoSQL implementations on top of GlobalsDB: key-value stores, document stores, graph databases or customised database types.

Currently supported APIs for GlobalsDB are Java, Node.js and .NET. The company will add new APIs subject to user demand.

Services

For GlobalsDB there is documentation available online, along with FAQs, a forum and blogs.

More broadly, InterSystems offers a worldwide central response centre as well as local support and individual support groups for each of its main product lines. The company also provides a specialised portal on its website for developers as well as a formal education and training programme. There is also a campus programme for students and faculty.

InterSystems IRIS

Last Updated: 8th December 2022
Mutable Award: Gold 2022

What is it?

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform was introduced in 2018 as a single, unified platform that acts as a replacement for, and evolution of, the company’s Caché database, Ensemble interoperability platform, and its various analytics offerings. InterSystems IRIS is available for on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid deployments, with Kubernetes support included.

The major elements of InterSystems IRIS include a horizontally and vertically scalable, multi-model, transactional-analytic database with full ACID compliance and immediate consistency; scalable and distributed application server(s); an Eclipse-based development environment supporting several languages; a business process layer equipped with a rules engine, workflow and process orchestration; specific capabilities to support self-service-enabled analytics on structured or unstructured data; integration with streaming environments such as Apache Kafka; and on-demand access to data across multiple data sources via a data fabric architecture.

Customer Quotes

“We view InterSystems (IRIS) as a powerful and comprehensive platform for development. InterSystems provides all the capabilities we need to meet our business demands, in one seamless environment.”
CFAO

How does it work?

InterSystems IRIS stores data in multi-dimensional arrays. It supports relational, object (with full persistence, polymorphism, inheritance and so forth, and with no requirement for object-relational mappings), document, and multi-dimensional models, and you can implement any number of these within the same environment, with full interoperability across these projections, and without any duplication of data. Note that you can read an array either vertically or horizontally, which means that you only need to store data once to support both transactions and analytics. This is a major differentiator for InterSystems.

InterSystems IRIS scales to accommodate large workloads and data sets on commodity hardware, with both database and application servers scaling out horizontally. Application code is decoupled from the persistence of data, which allows application servers to scale horizontally, independently of the number of shard servers, and to distribute workloads automatically, thereby supporting both performance and consistency. The environment is configured so that nodes are designated as query, transactional or hybrid servers, in order to cater for different workload resource requirements. Data ingestion can be parallelised directly to each shard server, providing high-performance ingestion for streaming data, and analytic queries can be pushed down to partitioned or sharded data tables, further increasing performance and resource efficiency. The software can also make direct use of graphics processors for pipelining and so forth.

Fig 1 - InterSystems IRIS adaptive analytics

Analytics capabilities provided by InterSystems IRIS include a new IntegratedML feature that allows you to create and use predictive models using automated SQL functions; support for PMML (Predictive Modelling Mark-up Language) that allows native execution of predictive models developed in R, IBM SPSS and other environments; and a connector for leveraging Apache Spark-based machine learning and predictive models within the InterSystems IRIS environment (with parallel operations and high-speed connections from each of the shard servers into a Spark cluster). ‘Adaptive Analytics’ is another new feature – see Figure 1 – that allows you to expose analytic data only once, in such a way that it can serve multiple use cases simultaneously. This is accomplished using a ‘virtual cube’ data model, an alternative to the OLAP cube, that can be assembled using a drag and drop interface and deployed to various business intelligence and visualisation tools, such as Tableau, Power BI and Qlik (supported via an ODBC interface).

On that note, to facilitate the embedding of real-time business intelligence into operational applications, InterSystems IRIS includes a designer for creating dashboards; an analysis component, that can be employed by business users to explore and display relevant data; and an architect component, used to define your data model. For unstructured data, InterSystems IRIS includes natural language capabilities, and it supports Apache UIMA (Unified Information Management Architecture).

InterSystems IRIS provides several language options for development purposes. Apps that run on the platform directly can leverage SQL, Python, or ObjectScript (an in-house programming language) while external applications can also use Java, .Net or Node.js. Access to Python is a recent development and is a significant step forward in terms of access to trained developers (Python is more commonly used than ObjectScript) and programming libraries, without needing to sacrifice the performance, security, scalability and other benefits of an embedded approach. Notably, Python is considered a ‘full peer’ to ObjectScript, meaning that the two can essentially be treated as interchangeable and cross-compatible within InterSystems IRIS.

Why should you care?

Hybrid real-time use cases are common in financial services (for instance, fraud detection), retail (customer personalisation), manufacturing/IoT (detecting errors, predictive maintenance), and various other industries. InterSystems IRIS not only caters to these environments, but it is going to be more cost efficient than many of its rivals, thanks to the fact that you only need to store your data once and in only one place.

Moreover, we consider InterSystems IRIS to be highly performant and scalable. It is, for instance, quite capable of processing transactions, indexing incoming data, and performing analytics on both real-time data and non-real-time data (that is, historical data and reference data) at scale and in real-time.

The platform also takes pains to make sure its analytics are not just highly effective in theory, but easy to build, access and use in practice. This is described by InterSystems as the ‘last mile’ of analytics, and positioned as an essential capability for generating real value from analytics technology. We are inclined to agree.

The Bottom Line

We are long-time fans of InterSystems products, and the recent improvements to InterSystems IRIS have certainly not dampened our enthusiasm: it remains a compelling hybrid transactional/analytic offering.

Mutable Award: Gold 2022