NEMUG Newsletter
February, 2004, Articles
January Meeting: "InterSystems Ensemble: The Integration of Power and Ease"
Presented by Chip Gore, Senior Sales Engineer for InterSystems
Over time, most medium to large organizations wind up with many desperate applications developed in-house and from multiple vendors, often running on different platforms with different operating systems. And these applications usually don't 'talk to each other' in any meaningful way without a great deal of pain and effort.
The result is a "Tower of Babel" constructed over many years. To try and stay competitive, Managements are demanding integrated information on a real time basis, and for IT to meet these demands in this environment is nearly impossible. So, how do we meet this challenge without re-writing or replacing all of these systems? Enter Ensemble! Ensemble is InterSystems' new EAI product.
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) can be looked at as an 'umbrella application' that 'sits on top of' and receives, processes, transforms, and transfers 'messages' from all of the underlying applications and/or systems on a real time basis. In Ensemble's case, building an object structure view of these 'messages' which are then stored in InterSystems' own persistent 'data store'. This allows IT to produce management information using powerful reporting and data mining tools from the consolidated data. This 'data store' technology is the same storage engine technology that is used inside of Caché, with all of the performance, scalability, and reliability Caché is famous for.
The interface mechanism to/from the applications and Ensemble is referred to as an 'adaptor'. These adaptors come in two basic types, Inbound and Outbound, for moving information 'into' and 'out of' the Ensemble space. Adaptors are developed for each specific application being integrated, and InterSystems has a growing library of 100s of adaptors available out of the box, as well as providing the means to create new adaptors (written in ObjectScript ("M") and/or Basic) to be able to interface with applications that may be unique to the Enterprise. Within Ensemble, message objects are used move the data from each Application/System that is being connected.
InterSystems has successfully deployed numerous Ensemble based integration solutions all around the world, which are turning in outstanding performance. InterSystems version of EAI is unique in the field, embracing much of the philosophy and technology that is seen in Caché. Unlike other vendor offerings, which are very expensive and take very long times to implement even seemingly simple integration projects, Ensemble can be deployed and produce results quickly at a reasonable price compared to these other offerings. In fact one of the interesting things discussed was generating code from the data model mapping (diagram). Chip also pointed out that all of the messages the system receives are stored and are available for audit purposes (in fact, he related one case where Ensemble proved to be far more reliable then the underlying Oracle based application that the Business Process within this particular Ensemble Integration project would save data that was being passed though from this Oracle system, and in the event of Oracle System Failures; which the client had found would happen multiple times a week, and Ensemble would use it's own copy of the information while Oracle was down, and queue up this data for processing when Oracle came back up!).
The history of Enterprise Application Integration or EAI started with the identification of a problem for business. How do you:
- adapt various systems,
- transform data,
- rout messages
- monitor business activity
The goal was to have this happen automatically, but before EAI the processes didn't work well. The complex pieces all had different codes different parts.
Ensemble has been built from the ground up with the Power to handle any integration project. It is built with a Universal Service Architecture and persistent object engine. Ensemble works with Ease, getting the job done quickly with full spectrum customizable end-to-end management. The Adaptors have knowledge of the specific application or piece. There is a huge and growing list of adapter examples plus custom adapters.
In Ensemble, everything is standardized to one environment, with a single Metadata store for the descriptors for the various structures and API's. The messages are stored for reliability, audit and analysis, and with InterSystems' Transactional Bit Map Indexes, access both for runtime use as well as runtime monitoring is incredibly fast and reliable. By using uniform structures within Ensemble, keeping interfaces and data projections in sync with standards can be isolated, and easily managed, and many of these standard projections and interfaces are kept up-to-date by InterSystems' updating the Ensemble engine without needing to undergo costly modifications to Integrations that are already deployed.
Ensemble is faster, comprehensive, consistent, easier, customizable and extensible, scalable. It integrates services, operations, and processes. No competitor has a complete package, none does it better. With Ensemble, InterSystems is pushing the envelope in EAI, and more businesses are beginning to take notice of not just Ensemble, but all of InterSystems' technologies.
~ submitted by Bob Macauley & Heidi Pape Laird