Interview With InterSystems' Trevor Matz

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Trevor Matz is the managing director of Enterprise Application Integration at InterSystems.

IB MAGAZINE: InterSystems' recently launched Ensemble integration platform is said to enable universal business integration (UBI). How does UBI differ from other integration approaches?

MATZ: The goal of universal business integration is to enable business and IT managers to implement a "leave and layer" architecture that dramatically cuts the costs associated with building comprehensive "business fusion" integration solutions.

The attempt to create fusion between IT assets and business needs has been the driving force behind the latest generation of development architectures, database, integration, application and portal servers, workflow, business process modeling and automation tools, and business intelligence solutions. While these technologies and integration approaches have all provided some relief, the goal of a comprehensive platform incorporating the functionality of these technologies in a single, consistently architected product, has been elusive.

The universal business integration (UBI) platform is based on a new, innovative architecture that fuses these previously autonomous technologies in a single product. Recognizing that rapid and flexible business integration solutions are driven by metadata definitions representing all the integration touch points, and transactional – messages that represent the data flow between these loosely coupled autonomous systems, the UBIP places the data management tier, with its single, shared metadata repository and ultra-scalable transactional message warehouse, at the core of its architecture. The result: unified architecture, development and management across all four tiers of the integration platform stack – the data server, integration server, application server, and portal.

It is this unique technology fusion that supports the broadest set of integration initiatives and delivers on the promise of extremely fast information and application integration, as well as rapid composite application development.

IB MAGAZINE: How does Ensemble enable UBI?

MATZ: Ensemble fuses Application Integration (EAI) with Information Integration (EII) and unites SOA architectures with event-driven architectures, real-time business intelligence with business process orchestration, long-running business processes with real-time composite applications, data management with application development, message warehousing with message tracing, relational technology with object technology and Web services – using a single data/logic model, development and management environment across all four tiers.

IB MAGAZINE: How does iWay Software mesh with InterSystems' vision of UBI?

MATZ: As the leading provider of adapters in the industry, iWay has the expertise and deep understanding of the issues surrounding complex integration project requirements to make its adapters a key component of our UBI vision. We have partnered with iWay to fuse the iWay adapter framework with Ensemble to provide the most efficient mechanism for seamlessly integrating our two technologies from a development, metadata management, and system management perspective – a key UBI goal.