What 2020 holds for InterSystems IRIS
In the vast majority of organisations, data is spread across databases and hardware devices, which need to be connected. Employees need to make better use of data and they need to keep it clean. The InterSystems IRIS® Data Platform aims to deliver this. InterSystems chose the name IRIS as it’s an acronym of what is important to businesses both now and in the future and what they need to be looking for in their technology investments:
Interoperable
Reliable
Intuitive
Scalable
An organisation’s long-term data strategy must be based upon two key points – giving users freedom and flexibility. It will be essential to give data to businesses in the way they want it, and their focus must be on choosing the right technology partner, as they will outlast any individual technology. At InterSystems, our focus is on excellence in technology, service and everything that the business delivers daily. Vitally, in order to understand data it is essential to use a data platform such as IRIS to make actionable decisions.
Since its launch in 2018, we’ve added new functionalities to our data platforms and 2020 is likely to be a breakthrough year for IRIS as we introduce QuickML to make it simple for data analysts using SQL. By putting best-of-breed machine learning (ML) within the hands of SQL-oriented developers, QuickML enables organisations to put predictions within their existing applications without needing extremely-scarce ML expert engineers.
Development teams are increasingly required to build ML capabilities into data-intensive solutions, but very few of them have the internal resources or necessary expertise to effectively apply such functionality. QuickML solves this issue through an automated ML function available within a familiar all-SQL syntax. QuickML simplifies the process of building, testing, and deploying ML models and speeds up the process of integrating them into production applications. We are also introducing InterSystems API Manager, which will allow businesses to monitor and control traffic to and from disparate web-based APIs within their IT infrastructure.
In addition to introducing these new capabilities, InterSystems IRIS is also continuing to play an instrumental role in digital transformation projects, which was the case for MSC, one of the world’s largest shipping companies. At our Global Summit event in Boston, MSC’s Global CTO, Fabio Catassi, explained how the organisation, which operates in 150 countries, had a highly decentralised approach to IT, with dozens of disparate legacy software solutions being implemented ad-hoc for almost 30 years. Catassi wanted to bring this together with a goal of providing access to corporate software solutions from any device at any time to empower the company’s employees globally. He was also looking to transform manual processes into intelligent automated actions to optimise operations by incorporating IoT (smart containers), advanced API and analytics with AI, delivering a ‘one vision logistic project’.
Now, thanks to InterSystems IRIS the company is able to move over 1 billion containers online annually and around 400,000 new ones every day.
We’re currently in an era of interoperability in which data will drive the businesses of the 21st century. Developments such as QuickML will enable the democratisation of ML and underpin AI. It will ultimately support the drive to get more from data and it will be this operationalising of AI which will be key. The true meaning of AI is not artificial intelligence but augmented insight and that is something that a wide variety of industries will benefit from.
