An Ensemble Cast For App Integration

For 25 years, InterSystems’ bread-and-butter product has been its
InterSystems Cache database. In a departure from the past, next week officials will unveil an application integration product.

Ensemble is the culmination of a year of research and six months of
testing after InterSystems customers kept asking for an interface and
integrator to bind its databases with enterprise applications developed
by companies like SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle.

It’s an area the Cambridge, Mass., company thinks it can compete
effectively: many of the larger companies today are pitching an
all-in-one software package for the enterprise and not many are willing
(or financially able) to pick up the cost.

Integration, however, lets companies keep their existing applications
and database — products they are already familiar and comfortable with
— and have the ability to tack on new applications when needed.

“When you talk to the CIOs, they think of new application development,
or new application purchases as being relatively expensive, relatively
high-risk, relatively long payback,” said Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems
vice president of strategic planning. “They think of integration as
being shorter-duration, quicker payback, lower risk — less chance of
losing their jobs, and I really think it’s that mood that’s driving a
lot of interest in integration in the marketplace.”

According to research firm IDC application integration will take top
billing in 2004 with IT managers as more important than security or
Web-based projects.

With a leading database presence in the healthcare industry already,
InterSystems hopes to garner interest in Ensemble to the companies that
have deployed more than 100,000 systems worldwide, as well as attract
new customers. Grabscheid expects Ensemble to reach the revenue levels
of its InterSystems Cache product, which has seen about 30 percent
growth annually, in about five years.

Ensemble is based on three key functional areas: universal service
architecture, persistent object engine and end-to-end management. All
three cover the gamut of enterprise management of applications running
on the intranet.

The adapters in the universal service architecture allow any developer
platform — be it J2EE , .NET or XML
— to plug into a database (like InterSystems Cache, for
example, or SAP, or SQL Server). Customers can buy business
intelligence tools to run with Ensemble’s persistent object engine to
find out the metrics that are driving business within the enterprise.
Finally, its end-to-end management capability allows IT managers to
follow the progress of any application or process and determine where
any errors are occurring, or to find where any chokepoints are
developing.

Officials are pricing Ensemble at $125,000 for a full license, except in
the case of adaptors for SAP, Siebel or PeopleSoft, which are priced
individually.