Creating Connectable Applications

A bright future for application vendors

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:n 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. n A software vendor providing medical imaging solutions enhanced a productwith Ensemble technology and created a breakthrough application for radiologists. The application uses Ensemble’s integration, workflow, database, and business rules engine to provide up to a 20% increase in radiologist productivity.n A group of entrepreneurial developers used Ensemble as their primarydevelopment 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 newchallenges and opportunities by:n Easily creating connectable applications for faster implementations and rapid adaptation when customer requirements change.n Enhancing existing applications with adaptable workflow, Web and mobileuser interfaces, rules-based business processes, portals, Web services, analytics, and other new features – without rewriting.n Easily converting separate applications in your portfolio into integrated suites.n 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.

Innovation Platform

Enhance Applications Without Rewriting ThemWorking with your existing development platforms and standards,Ensemble lets you rapidly enhance existing applications – withoutrewriting – by adding:

n Rich Web interfaces n Messaging via an extensible enterprise service bus (ESB)n Business rules processingn Dashboardsn Data transformationn Adaptable workflown Web services and other service-oriented architecture technologyn Business activity monitoringn Active Analyticsn Out-of-the-box integration with the most popular applications, databases, and technologiesn 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 architecturesin mind, Ensemble excels at quickly building and deploying new business solutions that can leverage the functionality of existing applications, orchestrate new business processes, integrate data fromacross an enterprise, and use analytics on structured and unstructureddata to deliver insight at the point of action. The new capabilities of your Ensemble-enriched applications will giveyou a competitive advantage by helping your customers meet theirmost pressing IT challenges, including:n Making applications and information widely accessible through a variety of channels, including mobile devices.n Collecting and aggregating information from disparate sourcesinto a single, comprehensive view.n Automating business processes, including easily modifiablebusiness rules to control process execution, and human workflow.n Achieving data consistency across multiple applications and databases.

ensemble enables a breakthroughapplication for radiologists

ChAllenge: eliminate productivity roadblocks for radiologists.

InnovAtIon: enhance product to give end-users a single interface for managing a complex workflow and data frommultiple vendors’ applications.Radiologists have complex workflows that require interaction withmultiple applications. Study requests are managed by the radiolo-gy information system (RIS). The images to be analyzed are man-aged by a picture archiving and communication system (PACS).Dictating a report, checking the result, and routing it back to therequesting physician usually require another separate system. As radiology centers grow and work with an increasing number of healthcare facilities sending information for review and diagnosis, the productivity of each radiologist inevitably decreases.This happens because they have a growing number of interfacesand applications to sort through. Integrated Modular Systems Inc. (MSI), a leading integrator ofmedical imaging and healthcare technology solutions, usedEnsemble’s HL7 and DICOM integration, built-in human workflow,message storage, and business rules engine enabled IMSI to build asolution, imsiVOICE-Interactive™ with OneList™, that changes thenegative equation traditionally associated with the growth of radi-ology centers. The application ties images from a PACS to currentwork requests and to patient information from the RIS, tracksimages and issues a warning if the wrong image is being viewed,and attaches audio files and funnels them to transcribers or voicerecognition software. When the radiologist reviews and approvesthe report, it automatically flows back to the requesting clinician.“We have customers who are seeing as much as a 20 percentincrease in radiologist productivity while error rates have been significantly reduced. This means a considerable improvement in the bottom line for radiology centers that are growing their business.”

John Mazur, President, IMSI

CAse study

development and integration converge

ChAllenge: Focus development resources oncreating superior software without gettingbogged down in the integration technologyrequired for deployment in extremely complexIt environments.

InnovAtIon: Rapid application developmentand integration with Intersystems ensemble.QuadraMed, a leading vendor of enterprise softwaresolutions for hospitals and integrated healthcare delivery networks, produces a wide range of clinical,revenue cycle, patient self-service, identity resolution,and scheduling applications. The company’s productstrategy includes a foundational role for Ensemble.QuadraMed® first used Ensemble as the platform forthe QuadraMed Smart Identity eXchange, an enterprisemaster person index (EMPI) and federated identityresolution solution for multi-entity, integrated healthsystems, and health information exchanges. UsingEnsemble allowed QuadraMed to focus on rapid devel-opment of the core business logic that makes SmartIdentity eXchange a compelling product, and to bring itto market quickly.Within the suite of QuadraMed products, Ensemblehandles critical functions including messaging opera-tions, business process orchestration, rules processing,alert handling, exposure of functional services as Webservices, and integration with other applications anddatabases in customer environments. QuadraMed’sdevelopers appreciate that Ensemble is a single, unified development, integration, and runtime envi-ronment that supports the high-performance and reliability of their applications.“Ensemble is a strategic platform for QuadraMed’s#1 in KLAS, EMPI solution. It is helping us to create new solutions faster, streamline customerbusiness processes, and speed up implementationand integration at our customer sites.”

Tom Easterly, Senior Vice President, QuadraMed

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Ensemble’s comprehensive and consistent architectureincludes all the technology needed to create connectable applications without having to first integrate multipledevelopment and integration platforms. This fusion ofpreviously independent technology has only a single,rapid learning curve and dramatically reduces yourtime-to-market and costs. At the same time, it lowersmanagement overhead by enabling you to rapidly tailoryour applications, without coding, using businessprocess definitions, rules, and workflows for specificmarkets or customers.the integration platform that includesrapid development technology

developer productivity gains and dividends:Ensemble’s consistent object representation of diverseprogramming models, programming interfaces, and data formats enables the use of Ensemble’s single development environment across all aspects of theproduct – from messaging to process orchestration toactive analytics. This unified graphical, XML, and code-based development environment simplifies and accelerates modeling and automating of businessprocesses, 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 providesequal support for both, and is easily extensible forfuture object models and technology frameworks. Thisapproach enables you to incorporate your applicationsinto customer IT infrastructures without time-consum-ing integration efforts, massive middleware rollouts, orcostly replacement of existing systems.Composite applications: When used for projects thatincorporate multiple systems based on different devel-opment and integration technologies, Ensemble’s advan-tages become even more apparent. Ensemble’s objecttechnology and repository provide a consistent, unifiedview of the diverse systems, applications, and servicesin the solution. This enables you to simplify compositeapplications for your customers by applying Ensemblemessaging, business rules processing, workflow, alert-ing, and active analytics consistently across all thedisparate 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 dramaticallyreduces the management overhead associated withloosely coupled, service-oriented solutions. High performance, reliability of deployed solutions, and development and management efficiencies are thehallmarks of the Ensemble enterprise service bus. Indemanding healthcare environments, for example,Ensemble customers report that application integrationprojects are completed nearly three times faster thanwith other products, and that message processing istwice as fast. Business rules: For integrated systems usingEnsemble’s enterprise service bus, non-programmerssuch as business analysts and support personnel canuse Ensemble’s rules engine to configure and changemessage routing and filtering rules in a matter of min-utes. This reduces the cost of making such changes, andit frees programmers to focus instead on new projects –reducing backlogs and delivering value sooner. service-oriented architecture: Ensemble can act as aproducer or consumer of SOAP-based and RESTful Webservices. As a producer, Ensemble can present any of the functions represented in its repository as a Webservice. As a consumer, Ensemble identifies externalWeb services and stores their object representations inits repository, where they can be managed and incorpo-rated into solutions as easily as local functionality.

Ensemble’s Innovations in Developer and Administrator Productivity

end-to-end managementEnterprise integration solutions can be the most difficulttype of systems to manage, because they link disparateapplication components, often spanning multiple hard-ware platforms, operating systems, and technologyframeworks. Ensemble’s built-in, persistent messagerepository, its rules engine, and a well-designed, easy-to-use management portal reduce administration andmaintenance costs, and enhance the value of projects. Ensemble provides complete reporting and analysiscapabilities for message contents that flow through thesolution, and operational statistics about the solutionitself. Access to the message repository and manage-ment reports, and graphical troubleshooting tools, helpskeep 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 isuniquely 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 notavailable when needed. Ensemble’s high-performance, persistent message repositoryenables rapid, reliable and guaranteed mes-saging. This increases quality of service byensuring data integrity, and by guaranteeingthat vital information is promptly and alwaysavailable. Cost savings accrue by avoiding thetime it would take to resend messages, checkand test the system, and involving applicationspecialists to help identify the problem. troubleshooting: Ensemble provides intuitive, browser-based, end-to-end configu-ration and management capabilities. Thesefeatures enable rapid problem identification,isolation, and resolution from a central con-sole in any secure location. Ensemble VisualTrace, graphical dashboards, and alert mecha-nisms provide immediate notification of exist-ing or potential problems. Immediate aware-ness of developing problems, and the abilityto rapidly diagnose and correct them, avoidsthe high cost of system downtime.

security: Ensemble establishes strong protection ofenhanced applications and integrated systems, while nothindering use, through:n Support for WS-Security, WS-Policy, and relatedstandards.n Authentication through multiple modes includingLDAP, Kerberos, operating system login, two-factorauthentication and Ensemble native login. n Authorization based on role membership. n Auditing information maintained in a customizable, tamper-resistant log. n Encryption of data in its repository and otherfiles using the AES algorithm and 256-bit keys.It encrypts data in motion using SSL or TLSmethods.

developing on ensemble leaves more time to innovate

ChAllenge: success of a new software product was at risk because its third-party integration engine kept failingduring customer trials.

InnovAtIon: embed a rock-solid integration engine with areputation for high-performance and ease of management.A new software product from 3M Health Information Systems,the 3M™ 360 Encompass™ System, had all the right capabilities,and was being released at the right time, to fill an importantneed in healthcare organizations. But the product’s third-partyintegration engine was not meeting 3M’s expectations. 3M needed a better integration solution, fast. Ensemble had clear appeal to 3M with its reputation for performance, reliability, rapid development, and advanced management. But first it had to pass the test of success at 3M’scustomer reference site. In 45 days from the start of workingwith Ensemble, the 3M 360 Encompass System was in produc-tion use at the customer site, with flawless performance. Sincethen, when problems have come up, Ensemble’s Visual Tracequickly located the issue – typically in source systems – enablingrapid resolution. With less time spent troubleshooting, 3M engi-neers now have more time to spend on product enhancement.“The same issues that took minutes to find and resolve inEnsemble took weeks with our legacy integration engine.”

Randy Thomsen, Developer, 3M

CAse study

Ensemble ArchitectureConceptually, Ensemble is a layered product built on thecore capabilities of its SQL-compliant, high-performanceobject repository, object abstraction, enterprise servicebus, and development and management technology. Inoperation, whether deployed locally, in the Cloud, or asan “Integration Platform as a Service,” Ensemble is a sin-gle, unified technology, with one consistent user inter-face and one short learning curve.Unique to Ensemble is a complete set of businessprocess management functionality seamlessly integratedwith development and integration capabilities. Thisstate-of-the-art fusion makes the creation of connectableand composite applications as natural as creating astandalone application. Composition and orchestration,workflow, user-modifiable business rules, portals, andbusiness activity monitoring and active analytics becomea natural part of your development discipline. You con-centrate on creating superior business logic that setsyour offering apart; Ensemble takes care of fitting yourapplication into customer business processes. Whenthose processes change, customers can use Ensemblebusiness 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 theunderlying interfaces and data that are part of integrat-ed systems. The object repository supports persistenceof all messages passing through integrated systems, plustransaction integrity, event logging and tracing, andhigh-performance transactional bit-map-indexed dataretrieval. The repository is key to Ensemble’s high-speedmessage processing, and management and reuse of solution components.

liberate information from enterprise data “silos”

ChAllenge: enable transparent informationflow from disparate sources within a newsorganization for delivery in different media andcontexts.

InnovAtIon: enrich newspaper publishingapplications 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. DTIcustomers need to pull information from a numberof disparate sources, and deliver it via a number ofdifferent media. DTI found an answer to this diffi-cult problem by enriching its applications withEnsemble.The result is a new publishing solution called“Liquid Media”,™ built around Ensemble’s connection, object technology, and data transforma-tion capabilities. It allows information to be drawnfrom multiple databases and other informationsources, at different newspapers in a chain, andautomatically assume the correct format for multi-ple delivery systems – from newsprint to mobilephones. 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 thesoftware 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

CAse study

With pressure on your business growing every day – to satisfy the changing requirements of current cus-tomers, to ward off threats from competitors, and towin new customers – Ensemble will help you raise yourbusiness to higher levels by delivering innovative solu-tions faster.Ensemble’s technical and business benefits include:n The ability to address the needs of new usersand markets without changing application code or creating customer-specific interfaces.n Higher customer satisfaction through rapid tailoring of applications using business processdefinitions, rules, and workflows for specific markets or customers.n Faster implementations.n The ability to compete successfully in the service-oriented world with automatic service-enablement of application functionality.n Ease of management. n Higher return on development investment.With your Ensemble-enriched applications, you willgain a strategic position in customer organizations byowning and orchestrating key business processes. Andyour customers will gain:n IT flexibility with support for multiple infrastructure technologies.n The ability to rapidly incorporate your applications into multiple business processes.n Lower total cost-of-ownership as the time andeffort required for application integration is dramatically reduced.n Greater insight into business processes throughEnsemble’s Active Analytics monitoring and business intelligence capabilities.n Easier access to applications through Ensemble-enabled browser interfaces.

Rise Quickly to New Levels of SuccessRapidly create new businessopportunities

ChAllenge: Create a fast, flexible, cost-effec-tive, and non-invasive way to bring trading part-ners into an electronic supply chain, even if thepartner is not electronically enabled.

InnovAtIon: develop and deploy a software asa service offering that rapidly automates any-to-any communication of business data.The founders of OmPrompt, a UK-based IntegrationService Provider, saw opportunity in addressingthe shortcomings of electronic data interchange(EDI) in supply chain applications. With only 30percent of the potential market actually using EDIat the time, OmPrompt set out to make it viable forthe other 70 percent. Most communication in thisgroup uses voice, FAX, spreadsheet, or flat files,with interchange requiring extensive manual inter-vention to map the data formats between senderand receiver.OmPrompt used Ensemble to develop a patentedmessage analysis and classification technology. Thesoftware employs artificial intelligence techniques to analyze sample messages (data, voice, or FAX)from partners and create corresponding Ensemblestructures for holding and manipulating the actualdata. The technology also builds a reference data-base, maintained within Ensemble, of all derivedmessage structures to aid recognition and auto-mated processing of new message types. The solu-tion uses the Ensemble rules engine and businessprocesses orchestration to address variabilitybetween customers, and is delivered as anInternet-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 anequivalent solution in Java.”

Brian Bolam, CEO, OmPrompt

CAse study

extensible enterprise service bus

embedded, sQl-compliant object repository

Advanced abstraction technology

Rapid integration & development environment

data transformations

Business process orchestration

n Rapid and reliable messaging solutions with publish/subscribe,event driven, and content-based routingn Intelligent message routing with an extensible rules engine andgraphical rules editorn High reliability and recoverability of long-running businessprocessesn Transactional bit-map indexing for real-time access to both live and previously processed messages for business activitymonitoring (BAM), auditing, SQL-based reporting, and managementn High reliability, recoverability, and performance for long-running business processesn Shared message and metadata repository enables faster integration, rapid development, easier management, and greater extensibilityn Provides a consistent and efficient object representation of different programming models and data formatsn Rapid development of composite applications through powerful abstraction of both logic and datan Enables use of the latest development tools and technologies to access legacy data and functionality as re-usable .NET orJ2EE components, Web services, or XML and is easily extensible for future object models and technology frameworksn Fast service-oriented development of composite applicationsthat leverage existing data and functionality n Simplifies and accelerates modeling and automating of businessprocesses for business analysts and developersn Mix and match graphical, XML, and code-based developmentto address widest range of integration scenariosn Transformation wizards and a graphical transformation editorreduce the learning curve and speed transformation developmentn Transformations can use simple formulas or lookups in internalor external data tablesn Unit testing service to test transformations without waiting for completion of the entire projectn Graphical modeling lets developers or business analysts focus on business process, including human workflow, rather thantechnologyn Mix and match synchronized integration approaches – graphical, XML documents, or code – to efficiently address the widest range of integration projectsn Orchestrate and maintain the state of business processes of any duration

Ensemble HighlightsBusiness rules engine

Active Analytics

Adaptable workflow engine

Adapter library and framework

standards support

end-to-end management

n Business analysts and support personnel can quickly configureand change decision points in a running business processn Frees developers to work on new projects, instead of modifications to old onesn Rules are separate from business logic and can be reused andmodified as easily as other Ensemble objectsn Leverages structured and unstructured data from across theenterprise for operational insight into business processes andsystem performancen Immediate awareness of business events and changes in keyperformance indicators, with automated responsesn Graphical dashboard displays for appropriate and timely management decisionsn Workflow tasks can be reused easily in any business processn Easy incorporation of complex manual interactions in compositeapplications spanning geographical, technological, and departmental divisions n Separation of user-based process definitions from business logic for easier and more reliable developmentn Out-of-the-box connectivity and data transformation to a widerange of applications, services, data sources, and technologiesn Rapid extension of existing adapters, and creation of new onesusing Ensemble’s development environment, object inheritance, and SOAP services to minimize the developmenteffort requiredn All adapters share common capabilities for simple, consistentintegration and reliable operations and managementn Bi-directional support for XML, SOAP, Web services, and otherstandard messaging formats, including HL7 and X12 in health-care, and standards for financial services, telecommunications,and other industriesn Enables interoperability with other systems supporting the same standardsn Leverages developer skills gained using the same standards in other projectsn Real-time visibility into business processes as well as system performance n Rapidly diagnose and debug problems during development and live operations using Visual Tracen Use any SQL tool to query and generate custom reports from the message warehouse for auditing and other management needs

view online demonstrations, and read more about ensemble, on our website at: Intersystems.com/ensemble

InterSystems Ensemble and InterSystems Caché are registered trademarks of InterSystems Corporation. Other product names are trademarks of their respective vendors. Copyright © 2012 InterSystems Corporation. All rights reserved. 11-12

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Advanced technologies for breakthrough applications