Software developer InterSystems is at the heart of products used by millions of people around the world. Its software is used by major healthcare providers, top Wall Street firms, and even a multitude of public safety organizations. That kind of ubiquitous use can carry a certain amount of anonymity, but with the recent launch of InterSystems’ IRIS data platform, that should change dramatically.
“In terms of customers, revenue, and implementation, we dwarf most of the data management companies out there,” explains Joe Lichtenberg, InterSystems director of marketing, data platforms. “The work we do, in large part, promotes our partners’ success and helps them become more successful.”
To that end, the InterSystems IRIS data platform gives users the capability to capture, share, understand, and act upon data while eliminating the need to integrate multiple development technologies. As a result, InterSystems IRIS applications require less code, fewer system resources, and less maintenance.
Users will then not only be able to analyze larger quantities of data in real time, they’ll also be able to make intelligent programmatic decisions based on all of those data assets. That means that the software creates obvious value for any organization from any multitude of industries. “We’re very strong in healthcare, but solutions built on our platform are also processing 13 percent of the worldwide equity trades every single day,” Lichtenberg says. “There’s so much data that financial services organizations need to drive their portfolios and to comply with ongoing regulations.”
Those regulations require financial services to analyze an increasing amount of data in order to reduce risk and force calculations to happen pretrade instead of at the end of the day, when those steps had traditionally occurred. It’s a lot to ask, and there’s no room for error when it comes to their data processing systems.
Luckily, the IRIS software provides solutions for that “perfect storm” of confluent concerns. InterSystems IRIS is the culmination of a longstanding response to consumer demands. As security and data demands have grown in recent years, it will help organizations grow with that change and even think to the coming next steps.
“Every organization that we talk to has security at the top of its list of critical requirements,” Lichtenberg says. “The challenge is to get a panoramic view of the data assets inside your enterprise and combine them with data inside and outside your firewall in a role-based, secure manner.”
That plays out differently in each of the industries that InterSystems touches. For example, in healthcare, the trick is to keep patients’ records secure and accessible only to those who need to see them. In the financial world, it’s not only keeping a lock on various Wall Street firms’ portfolios, but also making sure the data is constantly up to date with market changes that can happen several times a day.
And as data sources grow more complex and organizations have to combine very different sources into one warehouse, InterSystems’ software is becoming more adaptive. At times, those complex data warehouses can include clean, numeric data as well as seemingly random notes added into a field. To that end, InterSystems has diligently innovated in fields such as natural language processing, which can infer meaning and sentiment from unstructured data.
Evolutions such as these can be particularly helpful when working toward new trends in data analysis. Data systems in 2018 are not only about providing the answers a client needs, but anticipating needs before they even become apparent. That can make being a successful software company daunting work; it’s hard to try to create a plan for sustaining success that looks even two or three years into the future for any organization, let alone in a field that changes as rapidly as data analysis. Yet InterSystems has not only survived, but thrived in a world that demands a hyperfocus on what’s happening right now as well as safeguarding for the future.
That success comes, Lichtenberg explains, from focusing on both delivering solutions for other businesses and listening to their stories, challenges, successes, and needs. “The customers always provide the guidance that InterSystems needs,” he says. That continued innovation and awareness keeps the company atop a growing field of software developers and an ever-increasing amount of data.