For application vendors, InterSystems Ensemble® is more than just an integration platform. It is an innovation platform that promises a bright future.
Ensemble will enable you to create a new class of applications that are “connectable”, capable of interoperating with your customers’ systems and business processes. And by embedding Ensemble in your existing applications you can rapidly enhance them, without rewriting, to transform your product portfolio into an integrated suite.
Here are a few examples of how software companies are making their applications – and their businesses – more valuable with Ensemble:
Ensemble is so innovative, it has been recognized by such leading industry analysts as Gartner, Inc., who placed Ensemble in the "Leaders Quadrant" of the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects, 2Q07, and by KLAS, a prominent healthcare IT analyst organization that ranked Ensemble as the #1 interface engine in 2006.
The comprehensive range of Ensemble technology, with its breakthrough unified architecture, will enable you to respond faster than competitors to new challenges and opportunities by:
Working with your existing development platforms and standards, Ensemble lets you rapidly enhance existing applications – without rewriting – by adding:
Using the advanced object technology found in InterSystems Caché® our high-performance database, Ensemble seamlessly combines best-of-breed integration functionality with a rapid application development environment and consistent, end-to-end management. Designed with today’s service-oriented and event driven architectures in mind, Ensemble excels at quickly building and deploying new business solutions that can leverage the functionality of existing applications, orchestrate new business processes, and integrate data from across an enterprise.
The new capabilities of your Ensemble-enriched applications will give you a competitive advantage by helping your customers meet their most pressing IT challenges, including:
CHALLENGE: Software vendor needs to regain a strategic role in its customers’ operations.
INNOVATION: Introduce a new product featuring rapid composite application development and rules-based business process automation.
Credit unions have evolved. Their charters have become more diverse, and the number of services they offer has skyrocketed. As a result, the companies that supply software to support what used to be core credit union functions – savings and loans – have seen their influence in these businesses wane. Maestro Projects Group (MPG), a subsidiary of USERS Incorporated, a supplier of such software, found that by using Ensemble it could re-establish a central relationship with credit unions, and increase sales of new software and services.
The solution is an Ensemble-based integration platform composed of standardized components for credit unions. It leverages key Ensemble features, such as rapid composite application development and rules-based business process automation, to keep deployment time and cost low. Solution components can be customized easily to the requirements of each institution using Ensemble’s graphical business rules editor. When those requirements change, rules can be changed by the credit union itself, without incurring extra costs. Most customers begin by integrating the account opening process, then moving on to tackle other issues.
“Our credit union customers are completing routine processes in five minutes instead of fifteen. At the same time, they’re reducing the risk of error or fraud because Ensemble business rules and workflow assure that all steps in the process are completed as designed.”
Anne Ballard, General Manager, Maestro Projects Group. Maestro is a subsidiary of USERS Incorporated, which is a unit of Fiserv, a Fortune 500 company providing information management systems and services to the financial and insurance industries.
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.
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.
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
Enterprise integration solutions can be the most difficult type of systems to manage, because they link disparate application components, often spanning multiple hardware platforms, operating systems, and technology frameworks. Ensemble’s built-in, persistent message repository, its rules engine, and a well designed, easy-to-use management portal reduce administration and maintenance costs, and enhance the value of projects.
Ensemble provides complete reporting and analysis capabilities for message contents that flow through the solution, and operational statistics about the solution itself. Access to the message repository and management reports, and graphical troubleshooting tools, helps keep Ensemble-based solutions always available.
Because Ensemble delivers its advanced capabilities through a single technology stack, not a cobbled-together suite of products, management of Ensemble-based systems is uniquely coherent and efficient.
Reliability and quality of service: The loss of data integrity in an information system is unacceptable, and so is its associated cost. The same applies when critical data is not available when needed. Ensemble’s high-performance, persistent message repository enables rapid, reliable and guaranteed messaging. This increases quality of service by ensuring data integrity, and by guaranteeing that vital information is promptly and always available. Cost savings accrue by avoiding the time it would take to resend messages, check and test the system, and involving application specialists to help identify the problem.
Troubleshooting: Ensemble provides intuitive, browser-based, end-to-end configuration and management capabilities. These features enable rapid problem identification, isolation, and resolution from a central console in any secure location. Ensemble Visual Trace, graphical dashboards, and alert mechanisms provide immediate notification of existing or potential problems. Immediate awareness of developing problems, and the ability to rapidly diagnose and correct them, avoids the high cost of system downtime.
Security: Ensemble establishes strong protection of enhanced applications and integrated systems, while not hindering use, with four levels of security:
CHALLENGE: Deployment of a loan origination and processing application is slowed by the need to customize its connections and interactions with the different databases, legacy applications, and CRM systems in each financial institution.
INNOVATION: Enable rapid customization by configuration, instead of programming.
The application is one of the best in its class, but income from sales wasn’t rolling in as expected. Why not? For Forum Solutions, creators of the TAPS Lending™ application, the problem was time to deployment. With every sale, Forum needed to customize the application to interact with whatever existing systems their clients might use. For a solution that enables TAPS to communicate with these diverse systems, Forum turned to Ensemble.
Ensemble’s unified development environment enabled Forum to rapidly enhance TAPS with a business rules engine, XML-based graphical data transformations, connectivity to a wide range of systems, and messaging. The enhancements cut deployment time by 33%, saving their clients money and enabling Forum to increase revenue by taking on more new customers.
“With Ensemble it’s one environment for everything. That allows much faster development.”
Cameron Minges, COO, FORUM Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary of FORUM Credit Union
Conceptually, Ensemble is a layered product built on the core capabilities of its SQL-compliant, high-performance object repository, object abstraction, enterprise service bus, and development and management technology. In operation, Ensemble is a single, unified technology, with one consistent user interface and one short learning curve.
Unique to Ensemble is a complete set of business process management functionality seamlessly integrated with development and integration capabilities. This state-of-the-art fusion makes the creation of connectable and composite applications as natural as creating a standalone application. Composition and orchestration, workflow, user-modifiable business rules, portals, and business activity monitoring become a natural part of your development discipline. You concentrate on creating superior business logic that sets your offering apart; Ensemble takes care of fitting your application into customer business processes. When those processes change, customers can use Ensemble business rules and other configuration settings to adapt, without needing you to change application code.
Fundamental to Ensemble’s functionality and performance are its object abstraction facility, and embedded, high-performance object repository. Abstraction technology hides the nature, variety, and complexity of the underlying interfaces and data that are part of integrated systems. The object repository supports persistence of all messages passing through integrated systems, plus transaction integrity, event logging and tracing, and high-performance transactional bit-map-indexed data retrieval. The repository is key to Ensemble’s high-speed message processing, and management and reuse of solution components.
CHALLENGE: Enable transparent information flow from disparate sources within a news organization for delivery in different media and contexts.
INNOVATION: Enrich newspaper publishing applications with integration capabilities.
Digital Technology International (DTI), a leading vendor of newspaper publishing software, is committed to helping its clients compete successfully in the modern news dissemination business. This means going far beyond paper and ink. DTI customers need to pull information from a number of disparate sources, and deliver it via a number of different media. DTI found an answer to this difficult problem by enriching its applications with Ensemble.
The result is a new publishing solution called “Liquid Media™”, built around Ensemble’s connection, object technology, and data transformation capabilities. It allows information to be drawn from multiple databases and other information sources, at different newspapers in a chain, and automatically assume the correct format for multiple delivery systems – from newsprint to mobile phones. The solution frees data from isolated “silos” of existing systems without requiring a standardized data format. The Ensemble-enriched solution has opened new opportunities and given the software vendor more options to grow its business.
“With Ensemble, DTI has been able to create a whole new class of modern, connectable applications in an amazingly short period of time.”
Byron Oldham, VP of Engineering, DTI
With pressures on your business growing every day – to satisfy the changing requirements of current customers, to ward off threats from competitors, and to win new customers – Ensemble will help you raise your business to higher levels by delivering innovative solutions faster.
Ensemble’s technical and business benefits include:
With your Ensemble-enriched applications, you will gain a strategic position in customer organizations by owning and orchestrating key business processes. And your customers will gain:
CHALLENGE: Create a fast, flexible, cost-effective, and noninvasive way to bring trading partners into an electronic supply chain, even if the partner is not electronically enabled.
INNOVATION: Develop and deploy a Software as a Service offering that rapidly automates any-to-any communication of business data.
The founders of OmPrompt, a UK-based Integration Service Provider, saw opportunity in addressing the shortcomings of electronic data interchange (EDI) in supply chain applications. With only 30 percent of the potential market actually using EDI at the time, OmPrompt set out to make it viable for the other 70 percent. Most communication in this group uses voice, FAX, spreadsheet, or flat files, with interchange requiring extensive manual intervention to map the data formats between sender and receiver.
OmPrompt used Ensemble to develop a patented message analysis and classification technology. The software employs artificial intelligence techniques to analyze sample messages (data, voice, or FAX) from partners and create corresponding Ensemble structures for holding and manipulating the actual data. The technology also builds a reference database, maintained within Ensemble, of all derived message structures to aid recognition and automated processing of new message types. The solution uses the Ensemble rules engine and business processes orchestration to address variability between customers, and is delivered as an Internet-based service.
“Ensemble allowed us to develop a full and viable application when all our resources were constrained. We would have required approximately five times the resources to develop an equivalent solution in Java.”
Brian Bolam, CEO, OmPrompt