2024 has been a transformative year for InterSystems, and it has not gone unnoticed. Last year, multiple data management industry analysts including Gartner, Forrester, Ventana, IDC and others published more than 20 different reviews and reports that recognize our unique capabilities that are driving innovation and efficiencies across various industries.
These accolades not only highlight our innovative approach to data management technology and industry solutions, but also reinforce the trust placed in us by our customers and partners. Some excerpts from these analyst reports are below, with links to the full reports if you’d like to learn more. And of course, stay tuned as we continue to innovate around smart data fabrics, GenAI co-pilots and assistants, additional industry solutions and more in 2025.
Gartner
Gartner® positions InterSystems as a Challenger in its 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems, with our flagship data platform, InterSystems IRIS, scoring highest for application developer capabilities and multi-cloud/intercloud/hybrid critical capabilities. According to the report:
InterSystems’ customer satisfaction is notable for its depth and breadth. According to feedback from Gartner client inquiries, it retains its customers at a level above most vendors. Beyond customer service, customers praise the continued innovation of the platform and its ability to continue to scale and handle new challenges.
InterSystems’ high degree of integration through the entire application stack — including a single engine supporting both operational and analytic workloads — drives productivity, operational simplicity, and has proven well-suited to both low-latency, high-volume workloads, and complex operational workflows with a combination of analytic and operational requirements.
Forrester Research
Forrester positions InterSystems as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Translytical Data Platforms, Q4 2024. According to Forrester:
Translytical data platforms are next-generation data solutions built on a single database engine to seamlessly support transactional, operational, and analytical workloads without compromising data integrity, performance, or real-time analytics. They eliminate the need to move data from operational to analytical platforms, enabling low latency and real time transactional-analytical use cases, while simplifying data management infrastructure and lowering operational expenses.
Forrester scored InterSystems 4th overall among the top 15 vendors, 3rd overall in strategy, and 4th in current offering. InterSystems received the highest possible scores in real time analytics, streaming, vision, roadmap, and data modeling.
[InterSystems] strong vision is robust and forward-thinking, with a clear commitment to expanding translytical use cases and offering a comprehensive roadmap for its broader data fabric offering. InterSystems’ superior translytical roadmap emphasizes enhanced ease of use, distributed transactions, advanced streaming, genAI/LLM, vector search, improved UX, and unified governance.
Forrester also positions InterSystems as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Fabric, Q1 2024. InterSystems has been an early pioneer of leveraging a
smart data fabric architecture to help bridge data and application silos, with embedded real time advanced analytics (the “smart” in our smart data fabric). Forrester recognizes the advantages and rapid adoption of this approach, writing:
[E]nterprises are leveraging data fabric to accelerate new and emerging business cases such as customer experience, data science, IoT insights, global transactions, fraud prevention, business 360, and real-time insights. Many organizations are now leveraging data fabric for multiple use cases (occasionally a dozen or more). Forrester sees consistent growth of data fabric initiatives across all industries, including financial services, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, oil and gas, and energy. While data fabric traditionally focused on read-only analytical use cases, we have recently observed a notable shift toward transactional fabric, with bidirectional read-and-write capabilities to support modern applications such as microservices and real-time customer experience.InterSystems offers a comprehensive data fabric to support any use case at scale. InterSystems’ strong vision focuses on delivering integrated, consistent, trusted data at the right time to support various data and analytical use cases.
Ventana Research
Ventana Research (now part of ISG Software Research) publishes its Data Platforms Buyers Guide, which is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts, evaluating and ranking the top 25 data platform vendors. InterSystems scored 4th overall out of 25 vendors, with a rating of Exemplary (Ventana’s highest rating), and 1st overall in Adaptability. Adaptability is critical for organizations that are looking to implement data fabric architectures as a non-disruptive connective tissue to deliver innovative processes and analytics that bridge their distributed and disparate data and application silos. According to the report,
[a]daptability is an essential evaluation metric as it determines the flexibility and interconnectivity of the software provider’s product related to enterprise requirements. It also enables enterprise software to operate across the variety of platforms and cloud computing environments that exist today and in the future.
In addition,
Matt Aslett writes in ISG’s
InterSystems Smart Data Fabric Supports Intelligent Applications report,
I assert that by 2027, three-quarters of enterprises will adopt data fabric technologies to facilitate the management and processing of data across multiple data platforms and cloud environments. InterSystems’ concept of a smart data fabric builds on existing data fabric architecture by embedding analytics capabilities, including data exploration, business intelligence (BI), natural language processing (NLP) and ML, providing a single source of truth for data consumers via a consistent metadata and semantic layer. The complete capabilities provided by this smart data fabric approach are delivered by InterSystems IRIS, but the smart data fabric also provides a common backbone that is exposed as smart data services.
IDC
In its Expanding the Scope of Data Management:InterSystems and IRIS report, IDC notes,
InterSystems IRIS, with its combination of data management and analytics capabilities, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, AI orchestration, and Smart Data Fabric... is itself a recognition that IRIS will not be the only data technology in use in any given customer environment, so offering open APIs for data connect and collect across disparate environments puts IRIS in an important strategic position in the enterprise.
Additional analyst coverage from 2024 includes:
Bloor Research titled a recent report, InterSystems IRIS: Now that is what I call a Data Management Platform. In it, they call InterSystems the best kept secret in the business.Noting that competitive approaches often require stitching together multiple disparate data management services that involve provisioning and integrating various technologies and copying data around in the cloud, in contrast,
IRIS’s real differentiation lies in what InterSystems calls its Smart Data Fabric. Too many platforms, and not just data platforms, are no more than a very loose collection of disparate tools that the customer has to stitch together. If you work for an enterprise with large volumes of transactions, multiple business partners and complex system and data integration issues, you would be well-advised to give InterSystems and IRIS a good look.
In addition, in its InBrief: InterSystems and the Data Fabric report, they recognize InterSystems with its Gold Mutable Award.
InterSystems IRIS has a broad range of capabilities that enable its use as the basis of a modern data fabric architecture. It has a distributed query capability, a data catalogue, a flexible database architecture, an integration platform, a semantic layer and AI-driven analytics, all embedded in the InterSystems IRIS data platform. There is probably no single vendor that provides every single element of a complete data fabric architecture, but InterSystems provides many of the most important elements.
Philip Russom, independent data management industry analyst, published
a detailed SWOT Analysis on InterSystems and our flagship product InterSystems IRIS. His takeaway:
InterSystems IRIS delivers a ton of modern and desirable functionality, unified in a holistic way for a wide range of customers, partners, and end-users, on a wide range of clouds and other compute platforms. The result is a strong, diverse, and up-to-date D&A [data and analytics] offering from InterSystems.
Omdia: The art of unlocking value through smart data fabrics - Lessons from InterSystems
InterSystems, the silent data giant behind more than one billion healthcare records, two billion daily equity trades, and more than two million tracked shipping containers, is stepping into the limelight. In this report, Omdia discusses several of the company's efforts to extend its data platform into the age of Generative AI.
S&P Global: InterSystems’ re-platforming strategy leads to new GenAI functionality in IRIS data platform
InterSystems has shown that its technology has staying power, perhaps because the company has been iterating on its core database technology for more than four decades in demanding markets, with a record of positive revenue. InterSystems is privately held and has been consistently profitable since 1979. In 2023, revenue surpassed $1 billion, and the company reports there are roughly 2,000 employees. InterSystems has built a loyal customer following with its technology platform. It serves the financial services and logistics/supply chain verticals, touting that it processes more than two billion equity trades daily and tracks more than 20 million shipping containers globally. [W]ithin the healthcare space, the company claims that it manages some one billion patient records.
Nucleus Research: Improve Performance and Reduce Costs with InterSystems
The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform is a comprehensive data management solution designed to support a wide range of applications. It offers multi-model database capabilities, including support for SQL, NoSQL, vector, and object models, enabling seamless data integration and management. The platform supports high-performance transactional and analytical processing, allowing for real-time data analysis and decision making. It features built-in interoperability tools, including support for various data formats and communication protocols, facilitating seamless data exchange across different systems. The platform's scalability ensures it can handle large data volumes and high user loads, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications. InterSystems IRIS also includes advanced security features, such as role-based access control and data encryption. The platform's integrated development environment supports rapid application development and deployment, with built-in tools for data modeling, business process automation, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI integration.
This is just a partial compendium of the recognition from industry analysts in 2024.But this is not just about accolades; they reflect our deep commitment to our customers and partners, and our relentless pursuit of technological innovation that is making a real-world difference.
There’s much more to come in 2025, so stay tuned...