A bright future for application vendors
Ensemble’s Innovations in
Developer and Administrator Productivity
Ensemble’s unique single-stack architecture includes all the technology needed to create connectable applications without having to first integrate multiple development and integration platforms. This fusion of previously independent technology has only a single, rapid learning curve and dramatically reduces your time-to-market and costs. At the same time, it lowers management overhead by enabling you to rapidly tailor your applications, without coding, using business process definitions, rules, and workflows for specific markets or customers.
The integration platform that includes rapid development technology
Developer productivity gains and dividends: Ensemble’s consistent object representation of diverse programming models, programming interfaces, and data formats enables the use of Ensemble’s single development environment across all aspects of the product – from messaging to process orchestration to business activity monitoring. This unified graphical, XML, and code-based development environment simplifies and accelerates modeling and automating of business processes, and it enables extremely rapid service-oriented development of composite applications.
Unlike products which are focused on a particular infrastructure, such as J2EE or .NET, Ensemble provides equal support for both, and is easily extensible for future object models and technology frameworks. This approach enables you to incorporate your applications into customer IT infrastructures without time-consuming integration efforts, massive middleware rollouts, or costly replacement of existing systems.
Composite applications: When used for projects that incorporate multiple systems based on different development and integration technologies,
Ensemble’s advantages become even more apparent. Ensemble’s object technology and repository provide a consistent, unified view of the diverse systems, applications, and services in the solution. This enables you to simplify composite applications for your customers by applying Ensemble messaging, business rules processing, workflow, alerting, and real-time business activity monitoring consistently across all the disparate systems involved.
Enterprise service bus/messaging: Ensemble’s comprehensive and consistent architecture delivers breakthrough time-to-market for messaging or complex integration and development projects, and dramatically reduces the management overhead associated with loosely coupled, service-oriented solutions.
High performance, reliability of deployed solutions, and development and management efficiencies are the hallmarks of the Ensemble enterprise service bus. In demanding healthcare environments, for example, Ensemble customers report that application integration projects are completed nearly three times faster than with other products, and that message processing is twice as fast.
Business rules: For integrated systems using Ensemble’s enterprise service bus, non-programmers such as business analysts and support personnel can use Ensemble’s rules engine to configure and change message routing and filtering rules in a matter of minutes. This reduces the cost of making such changes, and it frees programmers to focus instead on new projects – reducing backlogs and delivering value sooner.
Service-oriented architecture: Ensemble can act as a producer or consumer of Web services. As a producer, Ensemble can present any of the functions represented in its repository as a Web service. As a consumer, Ensemble identifies external Web services and stores their object representations in its repository, where they can be managed and incorporated into solutions as easily as local functionality.
CASE STUDY
Development and integration converge
CHALLENGE: Focus development resources on creating superior software without getting bogged down in the integration technology required for deployment in extremely complex IT environments.
INNOVATION: Rapid application development and integration with InterSystems Ensemble.
QuadraMed, a leading vendor of software solutions for hospitals and integrated healthcare delivery networks, produces a wide range of clinical, revenue cycle, healthcare information management (HIM), and enterprise scheduling applications. The company’s product strategy includes a foundational role for Ensemble. QuadraMed first used Ensemble as the platform for the QuadraMed Smart Identity eXchange, an enterprise master person index and federated identity management solution for multi-entity, integrated healthcare delivery systems, regional health information organizations, and health information exchanges.
Using Ensemble allowed QuadraMed to focus on rapid development of the core business logic that makes Smart Identity eXchange a compelling product, and to bring it to market quickly. Ensemble handles other critical functions including messaging operations, business process orchestration, rules processing, alert handling, integration with other applications and databases in the customer’s environment, and exposure of the application’s Web services. QuadraMed’s developers appreciate that Ensemble is a single, unified development, integration, and runtime environment that supports the high-performance, reliability, and ergonomics of their applications.
“Ensemble is a strategic platform for QuadraMed. It is helping us create new solutions faster, streamline customer business processes, and speed up implementation and integration at our customer sites.”
Jim Klein, Executive VP, CTO, QuadraMed
Ensemble: Integrate & Innovate
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