Finovate Blog

This is a sponsored blog post by InterSystems, a financial data technology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Successful financial services organizations today must be able to simultaneously process transactional and analytic workloads at high scale – accommodating billions of transactions per day while supporting thousands of analytic queries per second from hundreds of applications – without incident. The consequences of dropped trades, or worse – a system
failure – can be severe, incurring financial losses and reputational damage of the firm.

InterSystems’ IRIS Data Platform is a hybrid transactional/ analytic processing (HTAP) database platform that delivers the performance of an in-memory database with the reliability and built-in durability of a traditional operational database.

InterSystems IRIS is optimized to concurrently accommodate both very high transactional workloads and a high volume of analytical queries on the transactional data. It does so without compromise, incident, or performance degradation, even during periods of extreme volatility and requires fewer DBAs than other databases. In fact, many installations do not need a dedicated DBA at all.

An open environment for defining business logic and building mobile and/or web-based user interfaces enables rapid development and agile business innovation.

For one leading global investment bank, InterSystems data platform is processing billions of daily transactions, resulting in a 3x to 5x increase in throughput, a 10x increase in performance, and a 75% reduction in operating costs. The application has operated without incident since its inception.

Traditionally, online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads have been handled independently, by separate databases. However, operating separate databases creates complexity and latency because data must be moved from the OLTP environment to the OLAP environment for analysis. This has led to the development of a new kind of database. In 2014, Gartner coined the term hybrid transaction/analytical processing1, or HTAP, for this new kind of database, which can process both OLTP and OLAP workloads in a single
environment without having to copy the transactional data for analysis.

At the core of InterSystems IRIS is the industry’s only comprehensive, multi-model database that delivers fast transactional and analytic performance without sacrificing scalability, reliability, or security. It supports relational, object-oriented, document, key value, and hierarchical data types, all in a common persistent storage tier.

InterSystems IRIS offers a unique set of features that make it attractive for mission-critical, high-performance transaction management and analytics applications, including:

• High performance for transactional workloads with built-in guaranteed durability
• High performance for analytic workloads
• Lower total cost of ownership

InterSystems IRIS is enabling financial services organizations to process high transactional and analytic workloads concurrently, without compromising either type – using a single platform – with the highest levels
of performance and reliability, even when transaction volumes spike.

Founded in 1978, InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 80 countries. For more information, visit: Financial.InterSystems.com