Creating Connectable Applications
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 for the past two years.
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 connectable – and their businesses more valuable – with Ensemble: ■A leading provider of newspaper publishing software embedded Ensemble
in its flagship product and created a must-have upgrade for its customers and prospects. Its competitors cannot match the new Ensemble-based capabilities that enable newspaper chains to freely share and repurpose information and deliver it in whatever format is needed.
■A software vendor providing core financial applications for credit unions revitalized its business by embedding Ensemble in its products. The vendor uses Ensemble’s business process orchestration, business rules engine, workflow, and other features to create composite applications that make credit union operations much more efficient.
■A group of entrepreneurial developers used Ensemble as their primary development and runtime environment to build a successful Web-based electronic data interchange service for supply chains. The company determined that by using Ensemble it took one-fifth the resources it would have taken to develop this sophisticated software in Java. 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:
■Easily creating connectable applications for faster implementations
and rapid interconnection with new systems and processes when customer requirements change
■Enhancing existing applications with adaptable workflow, browser-based user interfaces, rules-based business processes, portals, Web services, and other new features – without rewriting
■Easily converting separate applications in your portfolio into integrated suites ■Enabling your customers to innovate by letting them rapidly modify
business rules and workflow in an application, without programming, to support changing or new business processes
Enrich Applications
Without Rewriting Them
Working with your existing development platforms and standards, Ensemble lets you rapidly enrich existing applications –
without rewriting – by adding: ■Rich Web interfaces
■Messaging via an extensible enterprise service bus (ESB) ■Business rules processing
■Dashboards
■Data transformation ■Adaptable workflow
■Web services and other service-oriented architecture technology
■Business activity monitoring
■Out-of-the-box integration with the most popular applications, databases, and technologies ■Business process orchestration
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:
■Making applications and information widely accessible through a variety of channels such as WiFi-enabled PDAs and other mobile devices
■Collecting and aggregating information from disparate sources into a single, comprehensive view
■Automating business processes, including easily modifiable business rules to control process execution, and human workflow
■Achieving data consistency across multiple applications and databases
Own and orchestrate a customer's
key business processes
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 busi-nesses wane. Maestro Projects Group (MPG), 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 implementation 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 move 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.”
Jay Kamp, CTO, USERS Incorporated.
USERS is a unit of Fiserv, a Fortune 500 company providing information management systems and services to the financial and insurance
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, rev-enue cycle, healthcare information management (HIM), and enterprise scheduling applications. The company’s product strategy includes a foundation-al 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 prod-uct, and to bring it to market quickly. Ensemble handles other critical functions including messag-ing 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 and reliability 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’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 develop-ment environdevelop-ment 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-consum-ing integration efforts, massive middleware rollouts, or costly replacement of existing systems.
Composite applications:When used for projects that incorporate multiple systems based on different devel-opment and integration technologies, Ensemble’s advan-tages 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, alert-ing, and real-time business activity monitoring consis-tently across all the disparate systems involved.
Enterprise service bus/messaging:Ensemble’s com-prehensive and consistent architecture delivers break-through time-to-market for messaging or complex inte-gration 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 min-utes. 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.
Ensemble’s Innovations in Developer
and Administrator Productivity
End-to-end management
Enterprise integration solutions can be the most difficult type of systems to manage, because they link disparate application components, often spanning multiple hard-ware 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 manage-ment 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 avoid-ing the time it would take to resend messages, check and test the system, and involving applica-tion 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 dash-boards, 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:
■Authentication through multiplemodes including lightweight directory access protocol, Kerberos, operating system login, and Ensemble native login.
■Authorization based on role membership. ■Auditing information maintained in a
customizable, tamper-resistant log.
■Encryption of data in its repository and other files using the AES algorithm and 256-bit keys. It encrypts data in motion using SSL or TLS methods.
Rapid application implementation
and customization
CHALLENGE: Implementation 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 configu-ration, 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-implementation. 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 implementation 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 (TAPS Lending is now owned by Akcelerant Software LLC)
Ensemble Architecture
Conceptually, Ensemble is a layered product built on the core capabilities of its SQL-compliant, high-per-formance object repository, object abstraction, enter-prise 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 creat-ing superior business logic that sets your offercreat-ing 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 perform-ance are its object abstraction facility, and embedded, high-performance object repository. Abstraction technol-ogy hides the nature, variety, and complexity of the underlying interfaces and data that are part of integrat-ed 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.
Liberate information from
enterprise data “silos”
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 success-fully 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 diffi-cult 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 transforma-tion capabilities. It allows informatransforma-tion to be drawn from multiple databases and other information sources, at different newspapers in a chain, and automatically assume the correct format for multi-ple delivery systems – from newsprint to mobile phones. The solution frees data from isolated “silos” of existing systems without requiring a stan-dardized data format. The Ensemble-enriched solu-tion 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 pressure on your business growing every day – to satisfy the changing requirements of current cus-tomers, to ward off threats from competitors, and to win new customers – Ensemble will help you raise your business to higher levels by delivering innovative solu-tions faster.
Ensemble’s technical and business benefits include: ■The ability to address the needs of new users
and markets without changing application code or creating customer-specific interfaces
■Higher customer satisfaction through rapid tailoring of applications using business process definitions, rules, and workflows for specific markets or customers
■Faster implementations
■The ability to compete successfully in the oriented world with automatic service-enablement of application functionality ■Ease of management
■Higher return on development investment 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:
■IT flexibility with support for multiple infrastructure technologies
■The ability to rapidly incorporate your applications into multiple business processes ■Lower total cost-of-ownership as the time and
effort required for application integration is dramatically reduced
■Greater insight into business processes through Ensemble’s business activity monitoring and business intelligence capabilities
■Easier access to applications through Ensemble-enabled browser interfaces
Rise Quickly to New Levels of Success
Rapidly create new business
opportunities
CHALLENGE: Create a fast, flexible, cost-effec-tive, and non-invasive way to bring trading part-ners 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 inter-vention 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 data-base, maintained within Ensemble, of all derived message structures to aid recognition and auto-mated processing of new message types. The solu-tion 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 approxi-mately five times the resources to develop an equivalent solution in Java.”
Brian Bolam, CEO, OmPrompt
Extensible enterprise service bus
Embedded, SQL-compliant object repository
Advanced abstraction technology
Rapid integration & development environment
Data transformations
Business process orchestration
■Rapid and reliable messaging solutions with publish/subscribe, event driven, and content-based routing
■Intelligent message routing with an extensible rules engine and graphical rules editor
■Real-time access to live and previously processed messages for business activity monitoring, high reliability, and recoverability of long-running business processes
■Transactional bit-map indexing for real-time access to both live and previously processed messages for business activity monitoring (BAM), auditing, SQL-based reporting, and management
■High reliability, recoverability, and performance for long-running business processes
■Shared message and metadata repository enables faster integration, rapid development, easier management, and greater extensibility
■Provides a consistent and efficient object representation of different programming models and data formats
■Rapid development of composite applications through powerful abstraction of both logic and data
■Enables use of the latest development tools and technologies to access legacy data and functionality as re-usable .NET or J2EE components, Web services, or XML and is easily
extensible for future object models and technology frameworks ■Fast service-oriented development of composite applications
that leverage existing data and functionality
■Simplifies and accelerates modeling and automating of business processes for business analysts and developers
■Mix and match graphical, XML, and code-based development to address widest range of integration scenarios
■Transformation wizards and a graphical transformation editor reduce the learning curve and speed transformation
development
■Transformations can use simple formulas or lookups in internal or external data tables
■Unit testing service to test transformations without waiting for completion of the entire project
■Graphical modeling lets developers or business analysts focus on business process, including human workflow, rather than technology
■Mix and match synchronized integration approaches – graphical, XML documents, or code – to efficiently address the widest range of integration projects
■Orchestrate and maintain the state of business processes of any duration
Business rules engine
Business activity monitoring
Adaptable workflow engine
Adapter library and framework
Standards support
End-to-end management
■Business analysts and support personnel can quickly configure and change decision points in a running business process ■Frees developers to work on new projects, instead of
modifications to old ones
■Rules are separate from business logic and can be reused and modified as easily as other Ensemble objects
■Leverages message and metadata storage of embedded database for operational insight into business processes and system performance
■Immediate awareness of business events and changes in key performance indicators
■Graphical dashboard displays for appropriate and timely management decisions
■Workflow tasks can be reused easily in any business process ■Easy incorporation of complex manual interactions in composite
applications spanning geographical, technological, and departmental divisions
■Separation of user-based process definitions from business logic for easier and more reliable development
■Out-of-the-box connectivity and data transformation to a wide range of applications, services, data sources, and technologies ■Rapid extension of existing adapters, and creation of new ones
using Ensemble’s development environment, object
inheritance, and SOAP services to minimize the development effort required
■All adapters share common capabilities for simple, consistent integration and reliable operations and management
■Bi-directional support for XML, SOAP, Web services, and other standard messaging formats, including HL7 and X12 in health-care, and standards for financial services, telecommunications, and other industries
■Enables interoperability with other systems supporting the same standards
■Leverages developer skills gained using the same standards in other projects
■Real-time visibility into business processes as well as system performance
■Rapidly diagnose and debug problems during development and live operations using Visual Trace
■Use any SQL tool to query and generate custom reports from the message warehouse for auditing and other management needs
For more information
Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects, 2Q07 Publication Date: 7 June 2007 ID Number: G00147640 Top 20 Year End in KLAS Report. KLAS conQidential Information. © 2006 and 2007 KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. www.healthcomputing.com InterSystems Ensemble and InterSystems Caché are registered trademarks of InterSystems Corporation. Other product names are trademarks of their respective vendors. Copyright © 2008 InterSystems Corporation. All rights reserved. 06-08
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