TAdviser interview: InterSystems experts - on technologies to accelerate digital transformation

Vadim Fedorov: Digital transformation is terrible, they scare her: "Whoever does not have time to transform will be overboard the business, or fall out of the cage of public administration." Digital transformation is wonderful, it beckons: "Whoever is in the leaders of transformation will take over the world." Digital transformation is a reason for manipulation - very often old good informatization and automation are simply wrapped in rustling packaging. So what is digital transformation?

Digital transformation helps organizations dramatically improve efficiency by entering other markets, implementing various business models, optimizing value chains, internal and external business processes through the use of digital technologies.

As part of the digital transformation, it is necessary to interact with customers, partners, suppliers, exchanging information with them and providing them with modern services.

Organizations must learn to work differently with information - a key asset of a digital enterprise. Digital transformation requires architectural approaches to manage all the data, structured and unstructured, that the company has. Data comes from smart devices in real time, from employees of the organization, from disparate sources both within the organization, and from partners and customers through software interfaces (Application Programming Interface,). API

All this data is important to use both for creating services and for supporting decision-making online using traditional business analytics tools and tools for supporting artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform was created for digital transformation projects. Technologically, InterSystems IRIS combines a multi-model control system, databases server applications, tools for managing software interfaces, integration applications and automation, as well business processes as analytics tools and tools for applying machine learning.

All these technologies are combined within a single platform with common development and administration tools that can be deployed both on customer servers and in the cloud. By combining technologies within a single InterSystems IRIS platform, the complexity of digital transformation projects is reduced.

Vadim Fedorov: We work with system integrators who perform custom projects based on InterSystems technologies and with development partners who develop replicated solutions on our platform.

Our customers are also organizations that carry out digital transformation projects in-house. As a rule, we are talking about integration projects, automation of business processes, development of new services.

A little-known partnership model for us is working with companies that create cloud services based on our platform.

InterSystems was founded in 1978, the Moscow office has been operating since 1998 and is engaged in the promotion of InterSystems technologies in the CIS and Baltic countries.

We have implementations in all major industries. These are projects in the public sector (as an example, our technologies are used in the electronic government of the Republic of Kazakhstan at the national level to automate public services), in retail (integration projects in the companies Riv Ghosh, Melon Fashion Group), in the financial sector (automation of business processes of Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan JSC - one of the largest banks in Central Asia), in power and housing and communal services (PJSC Novatek, Mosvodokanal JSC ).

Joe Lichtenberg: It is important to note that InterSystems Corporation is one of the world leaders in health informatization. InterSystems technologies are the basis for national and regional electronic health record management systems and the world's best medical information systems. For healthcare, a specialized version of the platform has been released - InterSystems IRIS for Health, created to develop and integrate medical information systems, and analyze medical information. InterSystems IRIS for Health supports industry standards FHIR, IHE, hl7, DICOM, etc.

Joe Lichtenberg: Reducing the complexity of digital transformation projects through the application of the InterSystems IRIS platform.

Due to the fact that technologies for application development and integration, API management, analytics are combined within a single platform, it is easier to develop solutions at InterSystems IRIS, they are easier to accompany and develop. The time and cost of projects are reduced and the cost of ownership is reduced.

Complexity is one of the main challenges of digital transformation.

Vadim Fedorov: As an example, we can cite a national project in the Republic of Kazakhstan to automate the processes of providing public services. For 4 months, an integration bus was introduced, which at the national level combined the channels for the provision of public services (e-government portal, population service centers and government agencies). Our platform made it possible to optimize services: by automating interdepartmental interaction, radically reduce the set of documents provided by the applicant, and ensure that citizens are informed about the status of service provision processes. Monitoring and monitoring of the processes of providing services in operational mode has improved the work of state bodies. As a result of the project, it was possible to qualitatively change the processes of providing hundreds of public services in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Joe Lichtenberg: In our practice, there are often situations when, thanks to the implementation of the InterSytems IRIS platform, the customer not only solves a specific business problem, but also qualitatively transforms the business model. A good example here is the experience of one of our production customers. It supplies drilling rigs and uses continuous monitoring of equipment delivered to the market using IoT technologies, which in turn is made possible by the use of the IRIS Data Platform. As a result, the customer was able to move away from the traditional sales model of their units and move to the service model, actually charging the results of using the units at the customer's site (that is, the number of drilled wells of a certain diameter and depth made in a certain rock). This allowed the company to increase the efficiency of its own activities.

Vadim Fedorov: Developers can use NoSQL, relational and object methods of accessing data within one application, which positively affects the development speed and allows them to create truly innovative applications.

The InterSystems IRIS platform provides high performance and scalability, which is critical for both big data and tens of thousands of users.

Joe Lichtenberg: InterSystems technologies are actively used in the financial sector by leading American and European investment banks, major brokers and other financial institutions to automate exchange trading, risk management, operational analytics. The InterSystems IRIS Data Platform competes in performance with both in-memory databases for transaction processing and specialized DBMSES for analytics. In one of the largest investment banks in the world, the InterSystems platform replaced in-memory DBMS in a key trading system for the investment bank. As a result, the reliability and scalability of the system increased, its maintenance costs decreased. During the work, there were no failures and problems with scalability, including during periods of high volatility. Modern requirements for regulating exchange trading have increased the amount of data by an order of magnitude. The system serves thousands of analytical requests per second from hundreds of other bank applications. For February 2019, IRIS Data Platform replaces various data stores to make more information available to the trading application in real time.

Thus, on InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, you can develop transactional, analytical and hybrid transaction/analytical processing applications that allow you to analyze information online.

Joe Lichtenberg: The variety of scenarios for the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning places special requirements on the platform solution in terms of the flexibility of their support. In production industries, with their colossal data flows of technological origin, the platform will require normalization, data aggregation and the use of mathematical models in real time; in other industries, an integrator platform will be required for a whole set of mathematical modeling environments in which constant model design occurs, accompanied by changes in the logic and sequence of their application. The IRIS Data Platform approach stands out from the traditional approaches in that our platform is able to completely organically support the creation of both "monolithic" (for example, training a limited set of models on intensive data flows in Spark) and "converged" solutions (for example, multi-stage analytical processes that, depending on the situation, call the necessary mathematical modeling functions from Python, R, etc.).

Vadim Fedorov: Application integration, business process automation and API management are critical to the success of digital transformation.

InterSystems IRIS integrates data, applications deployed to customers and the cloud, services for creating Enterprise Service Bus solutions. InterSystems IRIS also includes API management tools that enable you to provide APIs to your organization for vendors and customers.

InterSystems IRIS includes Business Process Management tools to automate the interaction of systems, services, and people (Human Workflow).

To develop digital products, depending on the task, we advise our customers to use a service-oriented or microservice architecture.

Joe Lichtenberg: It is important to note that all these capabilities are available not only to large customers and system integrators, but also to developers of replicated systems who embed InterSystems IRIS in their applications. This gives our partners additional competitive advantages.

Vadim Fedorov: It is worth starting with a discussion of the task with technical consultants of InterSystems and the pilot project. Developers can try InterSystems IRIS^[1] cloud].