InterSystems Expands Into Business Integration

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Ensemble abstracts external sources into classes
By Alan Zeichick

November 1, 2003 — Expanding beyond its traditional object-relational database product line, InterSystems Corp. has jumped into the world of business integration. The company's new BI suite, Ensemble, which was released Oct. 26, is designed to provide developers with an abstracted view of external data and application sources, around which they can build new composite applications.

According to Paul Grabscheid, vice president of strategic planning for InterSystems, the BI approach offered by companies such as IBM and TIBCO are too complex. Those systems, he argued, offer a large number of facilities, such as a messaging engine, database, application server, business-process management software and a portal, but "each of those facilities requires its own development tools and APIs, storage and management procedures," he said, which are left for either customers to develop or expensive consultants to implement.

By contrast, Grabscheid said, InterSystems' approach uses a simpler architecture built around a persistent object engine and metadata repository-the company's Cach? database-and one management interface. "We use adapters to access external sources, just like the other integration solutions," he said, "but we go deep into them to read the metadata. We then create classes that represent that metadata-classes with properties and methods that developers can access."

Those classes can be viewed as Java classes, .NET components or Web services, he said, or accessed via SQL queries against the Ensemble server. "Developers can use either an event-driven or service-oriented model" to work with the integration and to define orchestration, Grabscheid added.

Management, tracing and auditing functions use the persistent object database, which stores all of the messages in the product system for future examination; Ensemble includes a browser-based console that can be used to trace individual transactions, and for administrators to be notified when a transaction fails, he explained.

Developers can use InterSystems' graphical IDE to build applications and define orchestration, or they can use their own preferred programming tools, Grabscheid said. Developers have the choice of defining integration using diagrams, XML files or traditional programming techniques, he added. Workflow is defined using the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) specification.

Ensemble began shipping this week and is priced at US$125,000 per server processor, according to Grabscheid. The server software runs on Linux, Unix and Windows. Adapters are available for six types of external sources: databases, packaged applications, transaction systems, host emulation, communications protocols and vertical-industry protocols.

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