Focus on analysts: Does industry recognition matter?

Henry Adams, Country Manager, InterSystems South Africa.

---

As a vendor, it’s easy for us to profess that our products, solutions and services are the best. Naturally, we believe it, but we also invest millions in research and development to ensure they are. As a customer or partner, the role of identifying the best technology to partner with to ensure your success extends further than relationships and marketing material – which is why so many rely on the view of industry analysts.

It's pertinent to understand that accolades, recognitions and ratings as a visionary or leader, exemplary or innovator, are not something that analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, KLAS, Ventana Research or Bloor hand out lightly. They are calculated based on methodologies that have been perfected over the years. These firms understand that what they say can often influence buying decisions; many organisations use these reports to support their strategies and select IT vendors.

As a business leader, getting swept away in the sale is easy. But when I look at what makes me wake up every day, it’s ultimately the value we provide to our customers and how we help them overcome their critical business challenges. There is no greater reward than seeing first-hand how we have positively impacted the way our healthcare customers deliver their services or improve patient care.

There is an essential link between what the analysts say about your products and services and what your customers say. While these firms crunch all the product or solution performance data they can, they also take great pains in unearthing what customers say about these technologies and their relationships with vendors. The research covers ease-of-use, sales and after-sales support, technical capabilities and overall ability to meet a desired outcome.

It's safe to say that industry accolades are interwoven with customer success, and one will never be present without the other. At InterSystems, we take the opinions and recognition of industry analysts very seriously and use it to ascertain if we are solving our customers’ problems, delivering the support they need and innovating in the areas that will deliver the greatest value.

In December 2022, InterSystems was named a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, which we see as validation that our next-generation data platform and cloud-native smart data services are indeed visionary and meeting customer needs.

Being recognised as a visionary in this area is particularly rewarding in a world where data is king; unlocking the full potential of data is essential to using data for improved decision-making and providing a wide range of business value.

Translytical data platforms are essential to the new data economy. They provide a unified platform that supports transactions, analytics and operational insights in real-time, retaining transactional integrity. In fact, Forrester defines translytical platforms as “next-generation data platforms built on a single database engine to support multiple data types and data models”.

We believe InterSystems IRIS has been recognised as a leader in the Forrester Wave Translytical Data Platforms, Q4 2022 because it delivers comprehensive real-time operational and analytic, or translytical, capabilities proven at a massive scale with lowest latency and superior resource utilisation, meeting the most demanding real-time requirements with lowest total cost of ownership and unmatched reliability.

Organisations are awash with data from different systems and sources, all with different structures and formats. With a multimodel data platform, rather than implementing different database management systems to manage different data representations, organisations can manage multiple data models such as document, graph and relational in a single data platform, offering greater efficiency, speed, scale, performance, integration and security.

InterSystems IRIS provides a visionary approach to multimodel data support. It creates one single rich representation of data on disk and in memory, from which it can be represented as relational, document, object, key value and other formats without duplicating data. This is why we are delighted that our InterSystems IRIS data platform was recognised as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Multimodel Data Platforms, Q3 2021.

With the amount of data being served across clouds and through multiple applications, vendors must be able to serve operational and analytical workloads through a single data platform product.

According to Ventana Research, this is exactly what InterSystems IRIS, our cloud-first data platform, is doing for customers. As Ventana Research says, InterSystems IRIS “reduces the need to implement and integrate multiple technologies, resulting in less code, fewer system resources and less maintenance”. In fact, our ability to provide a consistent, accurate and real-time view of enterprise data is demonstrated by the fact that InterSystems IRIS has been named "exemplary", the top ranking in the 2023 Value Index, for top ranking in the 2023 Value Index for Data Platforms Report by Ventana Research.

We are also exceptionally proud of the fact that in the “2023 Best in KLAS Global Software Services” report, which is based on satisfaction ratings gathered in 2022 from thousands of healthcare providers, InterSystems HealthShare Unified Care Record received the Best in KLAS for clinical portals, which is reserved for top-performing solutions. Further, Bloor Research, another top analyst firm, awarded InterSystems IRIS a Bloor Gold Mutable Award in 2022.

Not one of these accolades is something we take for granted. They have been hard fought for and hard-earned through the work of a team of smart, thoughtful people committed to customer success. Additionally, they showcase what’s working for customers and the industry at large, offering a roadmap to success and a future view of where technology can take us in the future.