Kathy Gibson reports from InterSystems Virtual Summit 2021 – As analytics becomes increasingly more important, a unified data platform is not only becoming more critical but users are demanding more functionality from it.
Jeff Fried, data platforms product director at InterSystems, explains that InterSystems IRIS supports high-performance applications on cloud, on-premise and hybrid platforms.
The last release of IRIS added new features in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and operations, the development environment and the field of interoperability.
“And it goes without saying that we have also made significant enhancements in speed, scale and security,” Fried says. “In the last two years we have doubled the performance of InterSystems IRIS.
Another new release will be available soon, with a number of significant new enhancements.
In terms of interoperability, the upcoming version of IRIS will deliver easier integration with existing systems throughout the lifecycle.
And, in the developer experience arena, it will make it easier to build powerful applications in the systems they choose to use.
In addition, an open exchange will allow developers to share ideas and innovations.
Adaptive analytics
InterSystems is investing heavily in analytics, and will introduce adaptive analytics in the new version of IRIS.
“This will let you bring data with the reach of your business analysts throughout the organisation,” Fried points out.
Essentially, developers can create virtual cubes as easy to consume models used by the analyst.
“These models are backed by IRIS to provide high performance and scale, so you are able to work with all of your data with the business intelligence tools of your choice.”
Python embedded
InterSystems IRIS data platform now features full native support for Python, enabling developers to use the world’s most popular programming language for creating data-intensive, mission-critical applications.
By embedding Python directly into the kernel of its data platform, executing natively on the server, the company has now expanded the accessibility for Python developers to benefit from the full range of capabilities provided by InterSystems IRIS.
Native Python support within the IRIS data platform allows developers to go from concept to production quickly, taking advantage of the fast-growing Python developer ecosystem, and leveraging hundreds of thousands of high-quality Python libraries.
Machine learning models and artificial intelligence applications developed with Python can now be incorporated directly into enterprise applications with InterSystems IRIS.
The analytics execute directly on the data in response to real-time events for the highest performance, while eliminating the need to move the data to a different environment for analytics processing – opening vast possibilities for fraud detection, customer personalisation, and many other use cases.
Python has been named the most popular programming language globally, thanks to its ease of learning, vast availability of libraries, and its widespread use by more than 8-million developers worldwide.
Cloud services
InterSystems has been supporting the cloud for some time, and has customers running in production in the cloud.
IRIS runs with Kubernetes and containers, and the new version will add targeted software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) functionality.
Message Transformation Services was launched back in July, translating data from the HL7v2 messaging format to HL7 FHIR format, accelerating analytics time-to-value for users of Amazon HealthLake.
HealthShare Message Transformation Services for Amazon HealthLake is the first of a series of Smart Data Services from InterSystems. Using Smart Data Services users can access the full power of the database, interoperability, and analytics technology as smaller, flexible, cloud-centric, managed services. Available from major public cloud marketplaces, developers can easily access, configure, and orchestrate them to meet your specific requirements.
Amazon HealthLake enables healthcare providers, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies to store, transform, query, and analyse health data at scale.
HealthShare Message Transformation Services is cost-effective and easy to initiate, manage, and scale for organisations of any size or specialisation.
It is cost-effective, has a single interface, is automated and gives users access to more data. Like all InterSystems offerings, it is reliable, secure and private.
Meanwhile, InterSystems IRIS FIHR Accelerator Services is a fully managed, enterprise-grade server for HL7 FHIR, giving developers an easy, secure, and scalable repository for storing and sharing healthcare data for their applications.
When FHIR developers build innovative applications that incorporate data from everyday life, they need a way to manage that data. And as the care environment expands beyond traditional healthcare settings, the need for interoperability in healthcare IT intensifies.
The InterSystems IRIS FHIR Accelerator Service is a reliable, turnkey solution for storing and retrieving FHIR data, enabling developers to be more efficient and to deliver their applications to market more rapidly.
Key features of the IRIS FHIR Accelerator Service include: authorisation and authentication; API keys; an efficient developer interface, support for HL7 FHIR version R4 and the batch import of FHIR bundles, exceptionally high availability and continuous updates – all available on AWS Marketplace.
And now, users can connect these two services together, to build new healthcare applications in the cloud.