Creating Connectable Applications

A bright future for application vendors

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 anintegration 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 andbusiness processes. And by embedding Ensemble in your existing applicationsyou can rapidly enhance them, without rewriting, to transform your productportfolio into an integrated suite.Here are a few examples of how software companies are making theirapplications connectable – and their businesses more valuable – with Ensemble:� A leading provider of newspaper publishing software embedded Ensemblein its flagship product and created a must-have upgrade for its customersand prospects. Its competitors cannot match the new Ensemble-basedcapabilities that enable newspaper chains to freely share and repurposeinformation and deliver it in whatever format is needed.� A software vendor providing core financial applications for credit unionsrevitalized its business by embedding Ensemble in its products. The vendoruses Ensemble’s business process orchestration, business rules engine,workflow, and other features to create composite applications that makecredit union operations much more efficient.� A group of entrepreneurial developers used Ensemble as their primarydevelopment and runtime environment to build a successful Web-basedelectronic data interchange service for supply chains. The companydetermined that by using Ensemble it took one-fifth the resources itwould have taken to develop this sophisticated software in Java.The comprehensive range of Ensemble technology, with its breakthroughunified architecture, will enable you to respond faster than competitors to newchallenges and opportunities by:� Easily creating connectable applications for faster implementationsand rapid interconnection with new systems and processes when customerrequirements change� Enhancing existing applications with adaptable workflow, browser-baseduser interfaces, rules-based business processes, portals, Web services, andother new features – without rewriting� Easily converting separate applications in your portfolio into integrated suites� Enabling your customers to innovate by letting them rapidly modifybusiness rules and workflow in an application, without programming, tosupport changing or new business processes

Innovation Platform

Enrich ApplicationsWithout Rewriting ThemWorking 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 architecturetechnology� Business activity monitoring� Out-of-the-box integration with the most popularapplications, databases, and technologies� Business process orchestrationUsing the advanced object technology found in InterSystems Caché®our high-performance database, Ensemble seamlessly combinesbest-of-breed integration functionality with a rapid applicationdevelopment 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 newbusiness solutions that can leverage the functionality of existingapplications, orchestrate new business processes, and integrate datafrom across an enterprise.The new capabilities of your Ensemble-enriched applications will giveyou a competitive advantage by helping your customers meet theirmost pressing IT challenges, including:� Making applications and information widely accessible througha variety of channels such as WiFi-enabled PDAs and othermobile devices� Collecting and aggregating information from disparate sourcesinto a single, comprehensive view� Automating business processes, including easily modifiablebusiness rules to control process execution, and humanworkflow� Achieving data consistency across multiple applicationsand databases

Own and orchestrate a customer'skey business processes

CHALLENGE: Software vendor needs to regain a strategicrole in its customers’ operations.

INNOVATION: Introduce a new product featuring rapidcomposite application development and rules-basedbusiness process automation.Credit unions have evolved. Their charters have becomemore diverse, and the number of services they offer hasskyrocketed. As a result, the companies that supply softwareto 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), USERSIncorporated, a supplier of such software, found that byusing Ensemble it could re-establish a central relationshipwith credit unions, and increase sales of new software andservices.The solution is an Ensemble-based integration platformcomposed of standardized components for credit unions.It leverages key Ensemble features, such as rapid compositeapplication development and rules-based business processautomation, to keep implementation time and cost low.Solution components can be customized easily to therequirements of each institution using Ensemble’s graphicalbusiness rules editor. When those requirements change,rules can be changed by the credit union itself, withoutincurring extra costs. Most customers begin by integratingthe account opening process, then move on to tackle otherissues.“Our credit union customers are completing routineprocesses in five minutes instead of fifteen. At the sametime, they’re reducing the risk of error or fraud becauseEnsemble business rules and workflow assure that allsteps in the process are completed as designed.”

Jay Kamp, CTO, USERS Incorporated.USERS is a unit of Fiserv, a Fortune 500 company providing information managementsystems and services to the financial and insurance

CASE STUDY

Development andintegration 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 software solutionsfor hospitals and integrated healthcare deliverynetworks, produces a wide range of clinical, rev-enue cycle, healthcare information management(HIM), and enterprise scheduling applications. Thecompany’s product strategy includes a foundation-al role for Ensemble. QuadraMed first usedEnsemble as the platform for the QuadraMedSmart Identity eXchange, an enterprise masterperson index and federated identity managementsolution for multi-entity, integrated healthcaredelivery systems, regional health informationorganizations, and health information exchanges.Using Ensemble allowed QuadraMed to focus onrapid development of the core business logic thatmakes Smart Identity eXchange a compelling prod-uct, and to bring it to market quickly. Ensemblehandles other critical functions including messag-ing operations, business process orchestration,rules processing, alert handling, integration withother applications and databases in the customer’senvironment, and exposure of the application’sWeb services. QuadraMed’s developers appreciatethat Ensemble is a single, unified development,integration, and runtime environment thatsupports the high-performance and reliability oftheir applications.“Ensemble is a strategic platform forQuadraMed. It is helping us create newsolutions faster, streamline customer businessprocesses, and speed up implementation andintegration at our customer sites.”

Jim Klein, Executive VP, CTO, QuadraMed

CASE STUDY

Ensemble’s unique single-stack architecture includesall the technology needed to create connectableapplications 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 dataformats enables the use of Ensemble’s single develop-ment environment across all aspects of the product –from messaging to process orchestration to businessactivity monitoring. This unified graphical, XML, andcode-based development environment simplifies andaccelerates modeling and automating of businessprocesses, and it enables extremely rapid service-oriented development of composite applications.Unlike products which are focused on a particularinfrastructure, such as J2EE or .NET, Ensemble providesequal support for both, and is easily extensible for futureobject 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 services inthe solution. This enables you to simplify compositeapplications for your customers by applying Ensemblemessaging, 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 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 Web services. As a producer,Ensemble can present any of the functions representedin its repository as a Web service. As a consumer,Ensemble identifies external Web services and storestheir object representations in its repository, wherethey can be managed and incorporated into solutionsas easily as local functionality.

Ensemble’s Innovations in Developerand 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 capabilitiesthrough a single technology stack, not a cobbled-together suite of products, management ofEnsemble-based systems is uniquely coherentand efficient.Reliability and quality of service: The lossof data integrity in an information system isunacceptable, and so is its associated cost. Thesame applies when critical data is not availablewhen needed. Ensemble’s high-performance,persistent message repository enables rapid,reliable and guaranteed messaging. This increasesquality of service by ensuring data integrity, andby guaranteeing that vital information is promptlyand 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 andmanagement capabilities. These features enablerapid problem identification, isolation, andresolution from a central console in any securelocation. Ensemble Visual Trace, graphical dash-boards, and alert mechanisms provide immediatenotification of existing or potential problems.Immediate awareness of developing problems, andthe ability to rapidly diagnose and correct them,avoids the high cost of system downtime.

Security: Ensemble establishes strong protection ofenhanced applications and integrated systems, while nothindering use, with four levels of security:� Authentication through multiple modes includinglightweight directory access protocol, Kerberos,operating system login, and Ensemble nativelogin.

� Authorization based on role membership.� Auditing information maintained in acustomizable, tamper-resistant log.

� 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.

Rapid application implementationand customization

CHALLENGE: Implementation of a loan originationand processing application is slowed by the need tocustomize its connections and interactions with thedifferent databases, legacy applications, and CRMsystems 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 incomefrom sales wasn’t rolling in as expected. Why not? ForForum Solutions, creators of the TAPS Lending™ application,the problem was time-to-implementation. With every sale,Forum needed to customize the application to interact withwhatever existing systems their clients might use. For asolution that enables TAPS to communicate with thesediverse systems, Forum turned to Ensemble.Ensemble’s unified development environment enabledForum to rapidly enhance TAPS with a business rulesengine, 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 toincrease 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)

CASE STUDY

Ensemble ArchitectureConceptually, Ensemble is a layered product builton the core capabilities of its SQL-compliant, high-per-formance object repository, object abstraction, enter-prise service bus, and development and managementtechnology. In operation, Ensemble is a single, unifiedtechnology, with one consistent user interface and oneshort 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 become a natural part ofyour development discipline. You concentrate on creat-ing superior business logic that sets your offering apart;Ensemble takes care of fitting your application intocustomer business processes. When those processeschange, customers can use Ensemble business rules andother configuration settings to adapt, without needingyou 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 ofsolution components.

Liberate information fromenterprise 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), aleading 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’sconnection, 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 createa whole new class of modern, connectableapplications in an amazingly short periodof 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:� The ability to address the needs of new usersand markets without changing application codeor creating customer-specific interfaces� Higher customer satisfaction through rapidtailoring of applications using business processdefinitions, rules, and workflows for specificmarkets or customers� Faster implementations� The ability to compete successfully in theservice-oriented world with automatic service-enablement of application functionality� Ease of management� Higher return on development investmentWith your Ensemble-enriched applications, you willgain a strategic position in customer organizations byowning and orchestrating key business processes. Andyour customers will gain:� IT flexibility with support for multipleinfrastructure technologies� The ability to rapidly incorporate yourapplications into multiple business processes� Lower total cost-of-ownership as the time andeffort required for application integration isdramatically reduced� Greater insight into business processes throughEnsemble’s business activity monitoring andbusiness intelligence capabilities� Easier access to applications throughEnsemble-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 techniquesto 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 andviable application when all our resources wereconstrained. 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

� Rapid and reliable messaging solutions with publish/subscribe,event driven, and content-based routing� Intelligent message routing with an extensible rules engine andgraphical rules editor� Real-time access to live and previously processed messages forbusiness activity monitoring, high reliability, and recoverabilityof long-running business processes� Transactional bit-map indexing for real-time access to bothlive and previously processed messages for business activitymonitoring (BAM), auditing, SQL-based reporting, andmanagement� High reliability, recoverability, and performance for long-running business processes� Shared message and metadata repository enables fasterintegration, rapid development, easier management, andgreater extensibility� Provides a consistent and efficient object representation ofdifferent programming models and data formats� Rapid development of composite applications throughpowerful abstraction of both logic and data� Enables use of the latest development tools and technologiesto access legacy data and functionality as re-usable .NET orJ2EE components, Web services, or XML and is easilyextensible for future object models and technology frameworks� Fast service-oriented development of composite applicationsthat leverage existing data and functionality� Simplifies and accelerates modeling and automating of businessprocesses for business analysts and developers� Mix and match graphical, XML, and code-based developmentto address widest range of integration scenarios� Transformation wizards and a graphical transformation editorreduce the learning curve and speed transformationdevelopment� Transformations can use simple formulas or lookups in internalor external data tables� Unit testing service to test transformations without waitingfor completion of the entire project� Graphical modeling lets developers or business analysts focuson business process, including human workflow, rather thantechnology� Mix and match synchronized integration approaches –graphical, XML documents, or code – to efficiently addressthe widest range of integration projects� Orchestrate and maintain the state of business processes ofany duration

Ensemble Highlights

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 configureand change decision points in a running business process� Frees developers to work on new projects, instead ofmodifications to old ones� Rules are separate from business logic and can be reused andmodified as easily as other Ensemble objects� Leverages message and metadata storage of embeddeddatabase for operational insight into business processes andsystem performance� Immediate awareness of business events and changes in keyperformance indicators� Graphical dashboard displays for appropriate and timelymanagement decisions� Workflow tasks can be reused easily in any business process� Easy incorporation of complex manual interactions in compositeapplications spanning geographical, technological, anddepartmental divisions� Separation of user-based process definitions from businesslogic for easier and more reliable development� Out-of-the-box connectivity and data transformation to a widerange of applications, services, data sources, and technologies� Rapid extension of existing adapters, and creation of new onesusing Ensemble’s development environment, objectinheritance, and SOAP services to minimize the developmenteffort required� All adapters share common capabilities for simple, consistentintegration and reliable operations and management� 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 industries� Enables interoperability with other systems supporting thesame standards� Leverages developer skills gained using the same standardsin other projects� Real-time visibility into business processes as well as systemperformance� Rapidly diagnose and debug problems during developmentand live operations using Visual Trace� Use any SQL tool to query and generate custom reportsfrom the message warehouse for auditing and othermanagement needs

For more informationView online demonstrations, and read more about Ensemble, on our website at: InterSystems.com/Ensemble.

Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Composite-Application Projects, 2Q07 Publication Date: 7 June 2007 ID Number: G00147640Top 20 Year End in KLAS Report. KLAS conQidential Information. © 2006 and 2007 KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. www.healthcomputing.comInterSystems 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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