The Benefits of Ensemble for
Application Vendors

Available in .pdf

Make your applications more valuable.
Without rewriting them.

Today's software buyers want to purchase applications that are ready to interoperate with existing systems and business processes – connectable applications. Ensemble, from InterSystems, enables software vendors to quickly create connectable applications – and rapidly increase revenue.

You can transform existing applications into connectable applications, without rewriting them, by simply linking to Ensemble’s integration technology and additional, high-impact services such as adaptable workflow, dashboards, browser-based user interfaces, Web services, and much more. In turn, your enriched applications will easily conform to your customers' application and infrastructure environments, turning them into an integrated ensemble.

With Ensemble-enriched applications, your current customers will be delighted that they can leverage the investments they've made in existing applications and gain immediate benefits from the new functionality and services you've added. Your costs will shrink as customer implementation time and effort is slashed. And you'll attract new customers easily with your Ensemble-enriched solutions.

Ensemble's revolutionary new way to enhance existing applications and create new ones eliminates costly and time-consuming "one-off" integration, "big-bang" middleware infrastructure, or the need to "rip and replace" existing systems with all new integrated solutions. Instead, with Ensemble you realize fast results by rapidly creating a flexible, integrated, service-oriented solution that adds up to more sales, more customers, and new markets.

With pressure on your business growing every day – to meet the changing requirements of current customers, to ward off threats from competitors, and to win new customers quickly – Ensemble will be a welcome addition to your business arsenal.

Ensemble's Solution-centric Approach to Integration

Unlike development and integration products created for sale to large corporations, which are focused on integrating the enterprise using a particular infrastructure (such as J2EE or .NET), Ensemble's "solution-centric" approach to integration has several advantages for software vendors compared to the enterprise "infrastructure-centric" approach, among them:

• Speed. Accelerate time-to-market by starting with results, rather than infrastructure. Improve your success in a marketplace that today is defined by "how fast do you act and how fast do you react."
• A focused, incremental approach. Quickly solve the most pressing problems of your customers and prospects to gain immediate breakthrough benefits.
• Rapid integration and business process enhancements. Avoid time-consuming, costly, and risky application modifications to support each customer. The problem is that customer-by-customer modifications can become prohibitively expensive deal killers, or may even be unacceptable regardless of cost.
• Open standards and infrastructure. Ensemble's solution-centric approach supports multiple and even changing infrastructure environments from multiple vendors. The historic problem in IT is that the word ‘standards' is plural – there are too many of them, they come and go, and change continually.
• Tightly focused, unified solutions. Unlike the infrastructure-centric solutions that are an aggregation of multiple tools and technologies often created by multiple vendors, Ensemble's solution-centric approach provides a tight, focused technology. Ensemble enhances existing applications to quickly and transparently bring them into the world of connectable applications.

The key to these capabilities is found in Ensemble’s core technology. This breakthrough is based on a powerful object model and object repository supporting a unique abstraction and service projection capability.

The Fast Path to Integration and Service Orientation

One of the top criteria for selecting a software vendor is that vendor's ability to supply applications ready to integrate and interoperate within a company's business, according to a recent analyst study titled, "How Do Customers Choose Software Companies?" This demand for connectable, essentially pre-integrated applications is driving a change from the traditional 1990s software development and integration model to a new model of converged development and integration technology. Ensemble is the first solution that combines previously separate integration, data, application, and portal server technologies into a single, seamless, easy-to-use environment that delivers rapid time-to-results.

Add-on Integration Technology and Highly Valued Services

Ensemble works with your existing development platforms and standards.  It links to your applications and enables you to rapidly add highly valued business process optimization services, without the risk and cost of application rewriting or technology replacement. These services include:

• Web services
• Support for service-oriented architectures
• Adaptable workflow (including human interaction)
• Business process automation/orchestration
• Business rules processing and management
• Dashboards
• Business activity monitoring
• Data transformation
• Portals

All Ensemble services are stored in the repository in an abstracted form as a consistent set of object classes. Once Ensemble is linked to your application, it abstracts that application's functionality into object classes, with the same format as the native Ensemble services, and stores them in the repository.

Reposition Your Application at the Center of the Enterprise

Just as with your application’s functionality, Ensemble represents the applications, Web services, and data sources in your customer's environment as object classes in its database, effectively linking the enterprise to your Ensemble-enriched application. This bi-directional abstraction provides a consistent, unified view of the underlying systems and applications – no matter what platforms, languages, data models, storage architectures, network protocols, or other technologies those underlying systems use.

Once your application resources are available as Ensemble objects, Ensemble automatically "projects" those objects outward as services which can be accessed by external client technology such as Java, EJB, .NET, COM, C++, XML, and SOAP. Unburdened by technology or platform support concerns, you now can focus on optimally positioning your applications within your customer's business, regardless of the IT environment. With Ensemble, your application can participate in a broad range of enterprise business processes, increasing its value to your customers, and its revenue potential to you.

Benefits of the Ensemble Architecture

Ensemble's fusion of previously independent development and integration technology, and its powerful database and object model, dramatically reduces time-to-solution and the management overhead associated with complex development and integration projects. It delivers important technical and business benefits including:

• Ability to sell in the service-oriented world with automatic service-enablement of application functionality
• Reduction of the time and cost of addressing environment and business process variability between customers
• Ability to address and capture new users and markets without changing application code or creating customer-specific interfaces
• Higher customer satisfaction through rapid tailoring of applications using business process definitions, rules, and workflows for specific markets or customers
• Ease of management with visual tracing of business process execution and messages
• Higher return on development investment

Solution-centric Benefits for You and Your Customers

Ensemble's solution-centric technology delivers immediate results for your customers, rather than hoped for results at the end of a long infrastructure replacement effort. By linking Ensemble to your applications, you instantly present customers with support for multiple infrastructure technologies and the broad range of rich, ready-to-use integration, workflow, and other value-added capabilities they're looking for. At the same time, the value of your applications increase, as they now can be configured to fit within many business processes, and put your customers on the fast path to the connected enterprise.

Your customers gain a more agile and adaptable, service- and integration-enabled application. You gain an even deeper, more central, and more lucrative connection into your customers' businesses.

Benefits for your customers include:

• IT flexibility with support for multiple infrastructure technologies
• Greater IT agility through the ability to incorporate your applications into multiple business processes
• Lower total cost of ownership of applications as the time and effort required for integration is dramatically reduced
• Greater insight into business processes through Ensemble's business activity monitoring and business intelligence capabilities
• Easier access to applications through Ensemble-enabled browser interfaces
• Better return on investment in existing and new applications as they now can be leveraged rapidly to meet changing business objectives

InterSystems and Software Vendors: A True Partnership

Since 1978, InterSystems has focused exclusively on the high performance database and rapid application development needs of software vendors. Today, InterSystems supports the needs of more than 1,200 software vendors worldwide.

Partnership with InterSystems means mutual respect and reciprocal benefits. A few basic values guide our relationships with our application partners:

• We will not compete with application software vendors by selling applications.
• Collaboration is a key InterSystems value. We now help more than 1,200 software vendors worldwide succeed. The wealth of experience derived from these relationships is applied to every new partner to help that business grow.
• We emphasize long-term relationships over short-term gain.
• We offer a free proof-of-concept program so that partners can experience the benefits of Ensemble without risk.

Enrich Your Applications, Enrich Your Business

Your partnership with InterSystems and use of Ensemble provides the support and key technology enabling you to:

• Adapt your product rapidly to new requirements
• Integrate your product with end user applications without having to take attention away from core product development
• Extend the scope of your product easily and cost-effectively to win new customers or expand into new markets
• Dramatically shorten time to market and lower the cost of creating additional functionality