Data Points

In this episode, certification exam developer Shane Nowack joins the podcast to talk about InterSystems certification exams. Learn all about why certification exams exist, get updates about current exams, and hear about upcoming exams and ways to get involved.

To learn more about writing questions for exams, see here: https://community.intersystems.com/post/earn-money-helping-intersystems-certification-write-exam-questions

For general information about certification, head over to https://certification.intersystems.com. 

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

In the first episode of Season 2, Product Manager Bob Kuszewski tells us about Embedded Python in InterSystems IRIS, which integrates Python into the platform alongside InterSystems ObjectScript.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

In this episode, Product Manager Bob Kuszewski tells us about Kubernetes and the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO), which makes it easy to deploy InterSystems products in your Kubernetes clusters.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Derek Robinson 00:00:03 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Product Manager Bob Kuszewski about Kubernetes and the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to the Data Points podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, we're joined by Bob Kuszewski, Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. Now about a year and a half ago, we had Luca Ravazzolo on the podcast to talk about Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform. Now, at that time, the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator wasn't even released, and lots of strides have been made in cloud technology ever since. Today, Bob will talk with us about Kubernetes and some of its common use cases, as well as how the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, or IKO, helps deploy InterSystems IRIS applications in Kubernetes clusters. And additionally, he'll also tell us a little bit about how Kubernetes compares with InterSystems Cloud Manager, or ICM. So without further ado, here's my interview with Bob.

Derek Robinson 00:01:32 All right. And welcome to the podcast Bob Kuszewski, Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. Bob, How's it going?

Bob Kuszewski 00:01:38 Good. How are you?

Derek Robinson 00:01:39 Good. Your first time on the podcast? 

Bob Kuszewski 00:01:41 It is!

Derek Robinson 00:01:42 …and we're finally back in the office here. I've been doing remote podcast interviews for a while now. So this is very refreshing to do one in person and be able to both be sitting here at the mics and have a good conversation.

Bob Kuszewski 00:01: It's exciting to be back.

Derek Robinson 00:01:54 So today we're going to be talking about Kubernetes, and specifically the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator and a few other cloud topics around the InterSystems technology stack. Over a year ago, we did a podcast episode with Luca Ravazzolo, who talked to us about Kubernetes and what it was. And in that episode, we maybe had a few hints toward the Kubernetes Operator, but it was much earlier and maybe not even released yet at that time, I think.

Bob Kuszewski 00:02:18 That's right. It wasn't out yet.

Derek Robinson 00:02:20 So we figured it was overdue to do another episode and have a good conversation about that. So, starting from the 10,000-foot view, tell us a little bit about what Kubernetes is and where its place is in the market today when it comes to cloud technologies.

Bob Kuszewski 00:02:31 Yeah. Kubernetes is this extensible open-source platform for maintaining and managing your workloads in the cloud. It is declaratively configured. It has a lot of automation built into it. This is how those websites that you go to that scale to infinity…this is how they all work. It's incredibly popular. It's really kind of taking over the world. One of the things that I love about it is that it's ubiquitous, and it's portable. So it runs on everything from edge cloud computing devices, like IOT devices—think of it that way—all the way up to giant…you know, Alibaba runs their whole website on it. You know Kelsey Hightower, who's a DevOps person, I think he's at Google Cloud now, you know, he describes it as it does all the things that the very best system administrators would do. It does automation, failover, centralized logging, monitoring, and it takes all the things that we've learned in the DevOps community and makes it default out of the box. So it's really easy to, once you get into it, it's really easy to build and grow on Kubernetes.

Derek Robinson 00:03:59 And that's also on top of, you know, we've had other podcast discussions and content where we talked about just containerization in general and the lightweight, efficient benefits of that. It's really taking that and then, like you said, taking a highly skilled system admin and everything that they would do with the deployment of those and kind of making it all work seamlessly. 

Bob Kuszewski 00:04:20. Exactly. Yeah.

Derek Robinson 00:04:22 So going to the next step a little bit there of understanding what Kubernetes is and its value, tell us about how InterSystems technology works with that. You know, basically, what is the tool that's available to be able to make that happen?

Bob Kuszewski  00:04:38 Yeah, last year we released the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator. Kubernetes Operator is a controller that extends the functionality of Kubernetes to allow you to create, configure, and manage instances of complex applications on behalf of a Kubernetes user. So the way I like to think about it is: a Kubernetes Operator automates all the best practices of what a human operator would do to create, monitor, and update an application. So the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator—we call it IKO—encapsulates all of these best practices specifically for IRIS: for how to set up IRIS, how to update IRIS, how to grow your installation of IRIS from something that starts very simple to something that's very complex, and has a lot of different servers that work together to provide this application. It does so in the Kubernetes way, so we use all of those great Kubernetes tools that are part of it.

Derek Robinson 00:05:47 So Kubernetes Operators are a concept that can exist outside of the InterSystems one. So there are other Kubernetes Operators out there that basically automate these tasks for the environment in the situation that's required. This tool is the InterSystems-specific one that allows you to do those InterSystems-specific things that a system admin might do manually if they were managing InterSystems.

Bob Kuszewski  00:06:10 Yeah, that's exactly right. So there are Kubernetes Operators for almost any application that you can think of. You know, WordPress applications, for example, there's a Kubernetes Operator that lets you just say easily, "I have a WordPress application. Here's what I'd like it to look like." And it handles all of the setup and configuration of WordPress. What we have is we have one that extends the Kubernetes API so that you can say, "Oh, create IRIS cluster." And then you give it options. There's a lot of options, but ultimately, it's very easy. It's all YAML or JSON, depending on how you want to do it. And so you can create anything from a very simple cluster to a really very complex cluster if you want to.

Derek Robinson 00:07:05 Right. Nice. So looking at how that applies in the real world, right. What are some examples? Cause that's what it sounds like to me is that you can use Kubernetes without a specified operator, right? But using, for example, the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator for using InterSystems IRIS instances, right? What are some examples and use cases where customers in the real world would be well-served or have been well-served to use the Kubernetes Operator, as opposed to just trying to manage things without an operator, just using Kubernetes and the IRIS instances?

Bob Kuszewski  00:07:37 Right. What the Operator allows you to do, is it allows you to work with IRIS without having to have as many people involved. You don't have to think about it; it allows you to—how I like to describe it—fall into the pit of success, just make it really easy to be successful with it. So we have customers who are using it in a number of ways. One that I think is very interesting is a very simple IRIS application, dealing with FHIR® messages and HL7® messages, and it is built in as part of the software that gets delivered with medical equipment. So there's a medical equipment manufacturer who I can't name, that is going to be including it right there with it. And they're using Kubernetes to manage their whole stack of all of the software, the stuff that they wrote themselves, as well as our built-in tools. So in the past, you've had to like almost ship a human operator with sophisticated equipment like this. With Kubernetes and our Kubernetes Operator, you have the ability to have that all be automated, and you just need much, much less human oversight. We also have other customers who are building, for example, SAS offering that…is using our Kubernetes Operator to—whenever a new customer comes in of a certain size—spin up a right instance of IRIS for that customer.

Derek Robinson 00:09:22 Nice, yeah. So, all those benefits that you explained, just making that available for whatever their need is, whether that is for replacing the human administrator in the scenario or the elastic scaling that you're talking about, based on the user demand, things like that. So, yeah, that's really cool.

Bob Kuszewski  00:09:37 It also lets you handle some of the things that can be tricky with manually setting up IRIS. For example, mirroring—it's a very common technique to have two mirrors for disaster- recovery purposes. With a manual setup, that's not easy to configure. It takes time. With the Kubernetes Operator, you just say mirroring equals true and it goes off and deploys it. Same with sharding. So if you have a large data application, you could split that data up across multiple physical nodes. Again, it's kind of a pain to set up manually. It's definitely doable; it's not the end of the world…but have that be automated, or to have one of the secret-sauce pieces of InterSystems IRIS that I love to talk about is ECP. And if you have ECP for compute servers, so you're offloading some of the business logic work from your main database server. Those can scale up and scale down just by changing a number in your YAML file, and you're good to go. It makes it really very easy to manage small applications, large applications, and we handle things like the web gateway or external language servers, you know, the whole breadth of what a full-blown IRIS using all the bells and whistles application could look like.

Derek Robinson 00:11:12 Right. And really one of the terms with Kubernetes that I've seen before is declarative configuration, in that you're kind of flipping it on its head and that you can, like you just said, update your definition file and, you know, Kubernetes and the Operator in this case with the, you know, things like mirroring, sharding, stuff like that, will do those things that are manual and difficult—you know, it knows how to get to that state that you've told it you want to get to.

Bob Kuszewski  00:11:34 Exactly. You just tell Kubernetes, "Hey, where do I want to be at the end of the day?" And it will make it happen. It'll make it happen in kind of the right way. 

Derek Robinson 00:11:46 That's very cool. So looking at that and seeing its use case in these containerized deployments and clusters, I'm going to backtrack a little bit to a couple of years ago when we first released InterSystems IRIS. And I remember in the learning group creating learning content around the launch of InterSystems IRIS, and one of the topics that was very popular at that time in the cloud space was InterSystems Cloud Manager, ICM. And so that is still an offering as well. And so I think one of the things that I've wondered before is the difference now with ICM and Kubernetes both in the picture, and also when customers would use one or the other. So talk a little bit about that comparison and where each one really has its sweet spot for customers.

Bob Kuszewski  00:12:28 Yeah. ICM is the cloud manager that's great for if you want to deploy onto VMs, and you're using one of the big cloud providers. So it's great…it works. It's beautiful. It does a lot of the same things. It lets you easily…through configuration….say, I want to set up a very small or very complex IRIS cluster, and it'll set all of that up. So this is great for organizations that are not able to, or not ready yet for embracing Kubernetes as a whole. For organizations that are using Kubernetes, it's a little bit different, right? You have to have a containerized application, which is actually a great thing. It makes it easy to move from dev to QA to production really easily, but it does take some time, and there's some learning involved there. So, you know, Kubernetes is great, and it does a lot of the same things, with IKO, that you can do with ICM.

Derek Robinson 00:13:41 Okay. So yeah, so there's, there's certainly sounds like there's some overlap there. And I know even from what I remember early in ICM, creating learning content there, you could have containerized applications there as well, but focusing on a VM-based architecture.

Bob Kuszewski  00:13:55 Yeah, exactly. You're still deploying VMs; it's just, those VMs would run in your container rather than something like Kubernetes, which is built around that.

Derek Robinson 00:14:07 Exactly, right. Cool. So to summarize and wrap up, you know, a lot of interesting and cool stuff, both having been released and still sounds like maybe on the way, what are some other cool things or notable things to look for in the future when it comes to these cloud developments in the InterSystems technology stack?

Bob Kuszewski  00:14:24 Yeah, we've got a lot of things going on right now, right? We're continuing to invest in ICM as well as IKO. You know, I believe that Kubernetes is really the future of how sophisticated applications get deployed, both in the cloud, but also an edge computing devices and, you know, in hybrid situations of all sorts and flavors. In addition to that, you know, we are expanding and investing in certain SAS offerings. We recently announced our FHIR Accelerator service, and we're building out our built-in interoperability features to make it easy to integrate with a wide range of cloud services like S3, KAFKA, those sorts of things. We're making these great investments and I'm really, really excited to share some of them with you in the future. Just not today!

Derek Robinson 00:15:22 Right, right. Got to leave little bit of intrigue always. So, what sounds like a lot of cool stuff. And of course, I assume this year at Virtual Summit as well, there'll probably be a lot of content around these different cloud areas. So definitely looking forward to it. So Bob, thank you so much for joining us. We'll have you on next time.

Derek Robinson 00:15:44 Thanks again to Bob for joining us to talk about Kubernetes. When it comes to learning Kubernetes, a lot of that learning curve is not so InterSystems-specific. There are lots of resources out there, including Kubernetes' own documentation from kubernetes.io, that does a great job laying out the foundation of Kubernetes knowledge. Once you have that foundation, you'll be more equipped to dive into using the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator to deploy InterSystems IRIS in your clusters. Of course, you can always reach out to your sales engineer for more information about trying the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator in your own deployments. That'll do it for Episode 20. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, Product Manager Benjamin De Boe helps us break down all of the new and exciting features and improvements in the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform. Benjamin tells us about exciting new developments in analytics, business intelligence, machine learning, development gateways, FHIR capabilities, and more.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Product Manager Benjamin De Boe about what's new and noteworthy in the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to the Data Points podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, I'm welcoming back a familiar guest, if you're a regular listener of the podcast, and that is Benjamin De Boe. Benjamin will talk to us about the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS. From analytics to business intelligence, to machine learning, to development gateways into FHIR improvements, Benjamin will walk us through all of the latest and greatest from the most recent release of InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:01:12 All right, and welcome to the podcast, Benjamin De Boe, making what I think is your third podcast appearance now. So Benjamin, thanks for joining us.

Benjamin De Boe 00:01:19 Pleasure, Derek. Thanks for having this.

Derek Robinson 00:01:22 So today we're going to talk about the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS, and kind of talk about what's in that, and what's exciting and what should be, you know, getting people's attention with this release. So, let's say I see you today in the elevator. You have 10 seconds to give me the rundown of what's new in this release of InterSystems IRIS. What would you say?

Benjamin De Boe 00:01:40 That's unfair, you're on one of the highest floors of the building (laughs), but anyway. So I think the most important thing, or the most important leap forward that we made in this release is what we did in analytics. We've made really a lot of investments. We've introduced InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics, which is a new add-on capability in this release. We've made IntegratedML, which we've talked about before, now a core part of the standard release. And we've also significantly upped our game in SQL to support analytical queries.

Derek Robinson 00:02:09 Nice, nice. So you clocked in just in time there, but let's say now we're getting off at the same floor and you have a few more seconds to talk about some of this in more detail. So tell us a little bit about Adaptive Analytics. I know this has been mentioned; in one of our recent episodes, we talked about analytics and AI. Give us a little bit more of a breakdown of Adaptive Analytics, 'cause that's one of the big new things that pops out at me in that ten-second description.

Benjamin De Boe 00:02:30 Yeah, absolutely, and it's probably worth its own dedicated podcast in a while, but essentially it enables customer to define their logical data model on top of data that's in their IRIS database, in business terms: so business measures, business dimensions, but it makes sense to business users and analysts. And then the technology in Adaptive Analytics takes care of mapping those business measures and business dimensions to whichever native format, their preferred tool of the day, for end-user data visualization or BI, prefers, but that could be Tableau, Power BI, even Excel, but also, many, many other BI tools. So because Adaptive Analytics takes care of that mapping of the business model to what those tools can represent and can show to them natively, time to insight for those end users.

Benjamin De Boe 00:03:24 And then the best part for me as a techie, is why we're calling it adaptive. So Adaptive Analytics will not just make sure that it all looks splendid from a business perspective, but under the hood, it will automatically monitor the queries that go through this business model. And while initially it will map those queries directly to the s, it will start looking for frequent patterns and it will pre-aggregate interim results for those; it will cache query results for those in a very smart way so that it can serve futureoff those prebuilt structure, so that it can support many more users, much more data, much more effectively. That's all going totally autonomous; it's a really cool piece of technology.

Derek Robinson 00:04:10 Right. Nice. And, you know, I think, when we had Carmen on a few episodes ago, we talked a little bit about, the differences between like a partnership and a homegrown technology in some of these areas. And so a lot of what you mentioned there also reminds me of kind of the business intelligence area, where we have InterSystems IRIS BI. So, talk a little bit about how that relates between Adaptive Analytics and InterSystems IRIS BI.

Benjamin De Boe 00:04:33 Yeah. That's a very appropriate question because it sounds very similar indeed. And indeed, what you would do with Adaptive Analytics is also business intelligence. Our pre-existing BI engine, which many will probably still know under its older name DeepSee, is entirely embedded in InterSystems IRIS, from the low-level interaction with sourcethrough our own custom-built , all the way up to the data visualization part, analyzer dashboards. That's all embedded inside InterSystems IRIS. And that embedded model enables us to do a couple of really cool things, so we can make sure that your IRIS BI cubes always show you real-time data because we keep them automatically in sync with the low-level data structure . We can make sure that if you're building an application on InterSystems IRIS, that in that application, you can also render a couple of charts or entire dashboards that are also customized according to your application…and just constantly, so that if you're drilling down in a BI view to particular lists of order, you can add a button that immediately goes through your order processing system to make sure that those orders are archived or put on the mail. That model is really applicable to application partners that want to keep their deployments simple, and just have powerful analytics embedded into those applications. Now with Adaptive Analytics, we're targeting a slightly different audience. So I already mentioned that we're catering to business users that may use a variety of other third-party tools: Tableau, Power BI, Excel, et cetera. So you may be working in a big organization that has a really large data warehouse that needs to support those different user groups, each with their own preferred tool. So that's where Adaptive Analytics can provide exactly that capability. So making sure that those business users, their business models, and the tools that they prefer to work with…again, they serve different use cases. So having introduced Adaptive Analytics doesn't mean that we're letting go of InterSystems IRIS BI. Actually, if you are an IRIS BI user, you'll see that we made a couple of really nice performance enhancements in this release, but they're just two separate use cases. In the next release, we'll also be looking for more interplay between the two.

Derek Robinson 00:06:58 Nice. Yeah. And that, that is another kind of theme of what we talked about a couple episodes ago about these different technologies working together and fitting different use cases for different customers. So going back kind of to the, the rundown you gave before, you mentioned a little bit about IntegratedML, so tell us what's new in that area.

Benjamin De Boe 00:07:16 Yeah. Last fall we did release IntegratedML on a 2020.3-based kit. And now, we're making it part of the main release, of our .1 release, which is the extended maintenance release, without really making it a standard part of the kit. What IntegratedML offers, Tom Dyar and our team already had a podcast specifically devoted to this project. But in a nutshell, the idea of IntegratedML is that it offers a simple SQL interface .

Derek Robinson 00:07:54 Right. Nice. And so I think kind of packaging those together and, you know, making it streamlined for people to be able to take advantage of all those features. So that sounds like a lot of analytic stuff and a lot of stuff, and between you, Carmen, and Tom, the product managers that we talked to last time, a lot in your area. So, tell us a little bit about what else might have happened in other areas of the product.

Benjamin De Boe 00:08:16 What do you mean, what else? (laughs) It would be a little unfair to monopolize everything with analytics. But one of the other main highlights of this release is our support for Kubernetes. If you're a system administrator and you managed to get your work done in less than 80 hours a week, you're probably using it. You're probably using Kubernetes because software environments really have gotten complex to configure and manage. And Kubernetes is a tool, an open-source tool, that helps you with that. And it's got a huge ecosystem and support by all major cloud vendors through dedicated Kubernetes services. So what Kubernetes does is it facilitates the declarative configuration and automation of containerized workloads. That's a mouthful, but what it means is that it helps you to dynamically scale and make your environments highly available by writing simple configuration files rather than operating five different interfaces with 20,000 buttons each. So how do we support Kubernetes? We've released the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, which is available with InterSystems IRIS 2021.1. And it extends Kubernetes with best practices with Operator that can help automate the management of an InterSystems IRIS cluster. So it embeds best practices, it embeds boilerplate stuff to make everything smoother and really work well, so that you don't even have to do all of that piping of that very simple text file.

Derek Robinson 00:09:47 Right, right. Nice. Yeah. And I think over a year ago, we did a podcast episode about Kubernetes the technology, but not so much about the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator. So good to know that that's one of the things that people can look for in this release. So kind of along that topic, does that mean, would you say that customers should now pretty much all be using Kubernetes as part of their technology stack within IRIS?  

Benjamin De Boe 00:10:10 I think it's worth a look for every system administrator, but it's absolutely not enough. With prior products, such as InterSystems Cloud Manager, we offered this as an add-on to make your life easier. Now with IKO, we actually had to make some of the configuration effort (remember those 20,000 buttons in a configuration interface). We've had to make our own a little more straightforward for IKO to just work. So you've probably noticed the CPF merge pilot, some of the things that we've done in the past year, to make it easier to configure InterSystems IRIS. So administrators can leverage those features in their own environments, in their own scripts, and their own other configuration utilities that they prefer to work with.

Derek Robinson 00:11:00 Cool. So it sounds like a lot of good stuff for analysts, system admins. How about developers? What in this release really jumps out at them and can be beneficial for them?

Benjamin De Boe 00:11:09 It's definitely one of our favorite audiences with InterSystems IRIS. As usual, we've made a lot of enhancements for them, both of the client-side libraries, as well as on the server side. On the client side, we've done a lot of small things such as .Net Core support, .Net Core 2.1 support, which may be very big. We've added connection pooling for JDBC and have some really good feedback from early adopters on that. And also some completeness work on the native APIs, but then on the server side is probably where the biggest changes and biggest enhancements are. So many of you will probably be familiar with our gateway technology, which allows you to implement business logic in Java or business logic in .Net, and then call it from ObjectScript, or call it from your business processes.

Benjamin De Boe 00:12:00 So we've added Python and R to that list, and we've significantly improved the manageability of those gateways. So we've turned them now into an external language server that will start automatically; they are declaratively configured, so it sounds a little bit like the Kubernetes story that we just came off. And we've also made it very easy for those gateways to call back into InterSystems IRIS using re-entrance connection—a bit of a tricky term, but what it means is that if you're invoking formal text scripts in Java code, that is doing some fancy stuff, that now the Java code can just open up a connection back to IRIS that's using the exact same credentials, exact same security context privileges, without you having to do anything. So that makes that interplay between your IRIS native codes and then the code running on your external language server, much, much smoother, and it just enables you to build nicer hybrid applications.

Derek Robinson 00:13:03 Nice, nice. So it sounds like we're kind of all in here on a modern app development with these improvements and kind of enhancements.

Benjamin De Boe 00:13:10 Yep, absolutely. And not just for the app development itself, but also for managing the APIs to which you expose them. So we've also released a new version of InterSystems API Manager, Version 2.3, which now has hybrid mode, which helps you deploy highly scalable and highly available environments. We've also added Ksupport and made some general enhancements to the overall user experience.

Derek Robinson 00:13:38 Right, right. Nice. So it sounds like, you just listed off a bunch of stuff that we could do future episodes on. So, that's also good to hear. So, shifting gears a little bit, we've talked mostly about really the data platform side of things. What is notable in the healthcare space for this release?

Benjamin De Boe 00:13:55 As usual, we've also invested a lot in our healthcare support, specifically in FHIR support. So in prior releases, we already supported FHIR and Smart on FHIR applications, both in the client and server mode, but now for IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect, which were also part of this release, we've really added a lot of new FHIR-related capabilities, especially if you get the continuous delivery releases for the 2020.2, .3, and .4 that we've released in the meantime. So if you hadn't tuned into those, make sure to look for their launch webinars and release notes as well. But now if you want to skip all of that, so we've got support for So that's really upping our game for FHIR. Also, to help customers migrate to our platform, we've extended the HL7 migration toolkit to automatically convert confirmation logic that was developed on third-party platforms, Cloverleaf, Delegate, or eGate. So anything you did on those interface engines can now be migrated automatically to HealthShare Health Connect or IRIS for Health.

Derek Robinson 00:15:15 Right, right. Nice. That's great stuff. So last question here, you know, one of the things that I feel like comes up with every new release really is the question, what does this mean for existing Caché and Ensemble customers that might be out there?

Benjamin De Boe 00:15:29 It's just a ton of new reasons to switch over to InterSystems IRIS. We think many of our customers that are still on Caché or Ensemble will be migrating to this release. So we've been on the market with InterSystems IRIS for about three years now. And many customers and partners have already made a jump, including our biggest partner, Epic, who has their first customers running live on InterSystems IRIS for a while now. So we offer tools to convert existing instances to IRIS, and to help you through this migration, we also have staff on hand to advise as appropriate. And at the other end of the migration, there's a faster, more robust, more secure, and more scalable platform waiting for you. So your mileage may vary, but we've seen customers' throughput increase by 10% up to a hundred percent just from upgrading from Caché and Ensemble 2018.1 to the latest IRIS releases. And then they even have to start looking at all of the new stuff that we added in the meantime into IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:16:29 Right. Right. So, yeah. You know, with each release, it feels like there's just more and more that adds up, and more reasons for people to move to the IRIS platform and to be able to take advantage of all these features. So, Benjamin, thanks so much for joining us again, and I'm sure we'll have you on soon about some of these topics that you mentioned as well.

Benjamin De Boe 00:16:47  My pleasure. Thanks, Derek!

Derek Robinson 00:16:54 Thanks again to Benjamin for joining us. If you enjoy hearing Benjamin break down our product stack, definitely check out Episode 17 from this spring, when he helped us to dive into the analytics and AI part of the InterSystems technology stack. Keep an eye out for more materials around this most recent release, and as always, check out learning.intersystems.com as well. One notable change we made recently on the Learning site has been the addition of a Learn the Latest button on the homepage. This will show you items in the learning catalog that have been released within the last 90 days. So it's a great way to know if we've published a new video, or course, or any other online materials. That'll do it for episode 19. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, we chat with Regilo Souza and Patrick Jamieson about the InterSystems IRIS® FHIR® Accelerator Service, a turnkey FHIR solution that will empower FHIR application developers to build innovative applications using FHIR data. Then, we hear from Evgeny Shvarov about the developer contest coming up involving this new and exciting product.

To learn more about the developer contest for the FHIR Accelerator Service, see here: https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-fhir-accelerator-programming-contest

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

In this episode, Carmen Logue, Benjamin De Boe, and Thomas Dyar join the podcast to talk about the various features and products that fall within the Analytics & AI area of the InterSystems technology stack.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Product Managers Carmen Logue, Benjamin De Boe, and Thomas Dyar about the overall analytics and AI technology stack at InterSystems, and how these products fit together.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to the Data Points podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, we have a bit of a roundtable discussion for you with three guests that have each appeared on prior episodes of Data Points: Carmen Logue, Benjamin De Boe, and Thomas Dyar. These three are all Product Managers or specialists for different product and feature areas within the analytics and AI part of the InterSystems technology stack. In our conversation, we'll talk about what technologies exist in this area, how they fit together, how some customers may use these features, and more.

Derek Robinson 00:01:15 Alright, so Carmen, Benjamin and Tom, thank you all for joining us on the podcast today. Why don't we start by introducing yourselves? I know you've all been on the podcast before in past episodes, but, Carmen, we'll start with you.

Carmen Logue 00:01:24 Sure. Good to be here again. Yeah. My name is Carmen Logue, and I'm a Product Manager on the Database Platforms team here at InterSystems. And my focus is really on the kind of business intelligence reporting aspect of things, so that set of users.

Derek Robinson 00:01:42 Cool. Benjamin?

Benjamin De Boe 00:01:44 Hi, and thanks for having us. So my name is Benjamin De Boe. I've been with InterSystems for 10, almost 11 years, and I look after, within the Data Platforms Product Management team to look after data management subjects.

Thomas Dyar 00:01:59 Yeah, my name is Tom Dyar, and I'm a Product Specialist, and I work in the same team as Carmen and Benjamin, but focusing on machine learning and AI within our database platform product.

Derek Robinson  00:02:13 Nice, great. And so thank you all again for joining us. And of course we're still doing these remote interviews after all this time, but hopefully before long, we'll be able to have a real roundtable in person again, in our office. But so, starting with you, Benjamin, we're going to be talking about our AI and analytics offering within the InterSystems technology stack today. So, let's start out with just telling us a little bit about, give us a little overview of the AI and analytics offering that we have.

Benjamin De Boe  00:02:38 It'll be one big overview today. Let's start with the beginning and maybe a little bit of a history because in a different life, I would have been a history teacher because we really evolved quite a bit over the past, say, four or five years. So, that has been an active process because we really started thinking about analytics and AI in a different way. So previously—again, say up to four or five years ago—we typically work closely with, development shops, with application partners that develop their applications, and we embedded select analytics capabilities inside of our platform so that they could take advantage of that in their application. So our audience was largely developers that then built something for their customers and those customers that went all the way from hospital information systems, lab systems to, outright coordination systems.

Benjamin De Boe 00:03:36 But now we've really started to cater more directly to a much broader audience of end customers that includes still developers, but also data scientists, data engineers, analysts, and also, totally nontechnical people. So that means that we've tried to really get under the skin of these people and try to understand how they think, what they need, and make sure that we have the solutions, or we have the technology in our platform to serve those people's use cases. And that very often meant that we went higher up the stack, that we have to offer more visually appealing, more, clients, kind of tools. And you could think of that as . And so that's really how we've been evolving our platform from a couple of embedded technologies that were really closely embedded, close to the data, at very high performance, very robust, to a more broader set that is still of course, made to be very robust and very dependable, but now we're also catering to a lot of end-user types directly. And we think that also benefits these application partners because they now also have a broader set of options to offer to their customers.

Derek Robinson 00:04:53 Right, right. Nice. And so when you look at kind of building that out to be for the users really end to end and offer everything that they need, does that mean that our partners and customers really kind of have to stick to the selected solutions that we offer, or is there more that they can choose from?

Carmen Logue 00:05:08 Oh, they don't have to stick to what we offer at all. They can use our choices, particularly we have some customers who like to have one organization that they work with, and have one set of support number and that kind of thing. But if you've followed InterSystems over the last years, you've probably heard the term freedom of choice, which is something that we've used in a number of ways, but certainly the goal was to provide our customers with access to the tools that they want to use. So it's kind of a, we call it a native plus open approach, which is having some things that are embedded in the platform developed here at InterSystems, like our InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence, our OLAP engine and NLP tool, which are embedded into the product, but also to make sure that we can support other tools by supporting key standards like MDX and PMML and UIMA so that we can be interoperable with those tools. And, so that's really the goal there. And I think as Benjamin said, over the last year or so, we've kind of looked up or moved up the stack, I guess, to looking at how the business users are interacting with our technology, something that's still relatively new, but things like InterSystems Reports, where it's getting information all the way to the end user about what's happening with their data.

Derek Robinson 00:06:41 Right, right. Nice. And I think, you know, us in the learning group have experienced this as well. Like as we have progressed our technology stack over the years, right? It can become a lot to keep track of, like what is in each umbrella of the entire stack. So, I know each of the three of you kind of have your products and features that are in your specialty areas. So, Carmen starting with you, kind just for the users that might have been exposed to these different features and products within InterSystems, they've seen it on the learning site or the corporate site, what features fit into this AI in analytics umbrella, at least within your area? And then we can also ask Benjamin and Tom the same question.

Carmen Logue 00:07:20 Yeah, that sounds great. And yeah, I guess we have made things a little more exciting for you guys, haven't we, by giving you more to talk about? So I mentioned at the start that, you know, my focus is on kind of business intelligence and reporting, and that sort of stuff. So I think of the kind of users that I think about are analysts and data modelers, all the way to the business user, who's interacting with something like Tableau or Power BI on the desktop. And so these people are often, they're kind of labeled as nontechnical, but in some ways they have to, you know, they have work to do to understand the data and be able to visualize it in a way that makes sense to their end consumers and the people who are making business decisions with it. So the things that I look after are InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence, or BI, formerly known as DeepSee; InterSystems Reports, which has now been available for about a year; third-party integrations with, Power BI and Tableau and that sort of thing. And then very soon I'm very excited about that with, with our , we will be including Adaptive Analytics, which is basically a layer in between InterSystems IRIS and those BI tools, to allow you to do some common data modeling and query acceleration. So, yeah, those are the things that I look after.

Derek Robinson 00:08:51 Nice, nice. That's great. And I think we had recently some Adaptive Analytics content coming out; I know some of my colleagues worked on that in the learning groups. That's great. Benjamin, what about yours?

Benjamin De Boe 00:09:02 Well, I'd like to think more about a second category of users that are not, that are typically more technical folks. So it's really data professionals, such as data scientists, data engineers. So people who are really very much hands-on with the data itself and are the end consumers of the of the . So maybe they built things for the personas that Carmen was talking about. For example, could be that they're building a predictive model, or they're building a particular subset of the data mountain, or a data pipeline that feeds the data warehouse. So these typically rolled-up-sleeves kind of folks, they would be using capabilities such as our InterSystems IRIS text analytics capabilities, the Apache Spark connector to access data that's stored on IRIS from Apache Spark. Some of the stuff that we've been adding recently to our SQL engine, also fits this group of users. And if you happen to have watched the session that we presented at Virtual Summit last year, about our integration with Alteryx, that's another example an integration or a combination of products that cater specifically to these data professionals, so that although we specifically work with Alteryx to offer nontechnical people or less technical people also, the ability to get really hands-on with complicated data.

Derek Robinson 00:10:34 Right, right. Nice. And so it sounds like in that answer, you've sort begun the transition to what I'm about to ask Tom about, which is sort of that AI and ML part that we haven't really gotten into quite yet. So I think Tom, that's your area, tell us a little bit about the products that are in that spot of the umbrella basically, and where the impact is there.

Thomas Dyar 00:10:53 Yeah, thanks. So, you know, one of the groups that we're looking at to, to kind of enable with this AI and machine learning, are even our more traditional kind of audience, that could be developers that know SQL, know the data, but they're really trying to just use the insights from a predictive model within their applications or workflows. And for that, they can use integratedML. It might be a model that was developed with a lot of input from the data scientists and the other groups that we're talking about here, but then when they actually want to use it, IntegratedML with SQL makes it very simple to use that model. And we support PMML as well in that workflow. So even if that model was developed in a completely different data science environment, you can use it within these mission-critical applications that are your everyday data flow, that's that this kind that developer audience really needs to rely on. So, we're going after, you know, AI and ML from a very practical viewpoint to try to overcome some of the challenges that people typically have in actually developing an application that uses a machine learning model.

Derek Robinson 00:12:14 Right, right. Nice. And, you know, I think that speaks to the evolution of this entire kind of umbrella of products and features, capping it off with that, really all the way through the machine learning and AI element of it, making it accessible to people that weren't previously experts there. Tom, kind following up on that a little bit, can you talk about the benefit? So, you know, we've run through these features, right? What is really the benefit for somebody to use InterSystems stack of analytics and AI features and products, versus using their own things like we talked about earlier with third-party tools and everything, like what's the benefit of really basing your analytics and AI approach around the InterSystems stack?

Thomas Dyar 00:12:52 Well, as Carmen mentioned, you know, there's that real fundamental aspect of us being open and also providing some functionality built in. We're also doing…getting back to IntegratedML, we're preconfiguring a lot of frameworks that are conflicts to set up and install, and work together with all of your other components of your larger system. So that know-how, and then supporting that with a single phone number and a consistent view of our customer can really make the difference in making it easy to work with us. We hear that in a lot of different metrics, that, from our customers. And so that's a really nice thing about working with us, and also working for InterSystems as an employee, it's unique. And another thing I wanted to mention, for that developer audience, for people that are building systems, we're coming out with embedded Python support within our platform so that people will be able to write server-side, and very complex applications just using Python and being able to go back and forth between our native ObjectScript and Python code, as we roll this out in the future. So that's an exciting thing for people that are really trying to have one central kind of application development environment. Python is a critical, part of many ecosystems and provides a lot of functionality, a lot of different libraries. So it's important that we support that.

Derek Robinson 00:14:31 Yeah. And we've actually had some discussions, I think embedded Python could be a future episode, as we look at the development of these products and features. So we've had some discussions about that, for sure. Kind of building off of one of the things you said about being, you know, one of the advantages is being open and being able to connect with other technologies. And so I want to revisit Carmen, your area of the product and feature umbrella, which, a lot of times, as I understand it, with some of these newer capabilities that are higher up on the stack, they can sometimes be partnerships versus actually homegrown technologies. Can you talk a little bit about that difference in kind of where the benefit is for a user to be able to understand what's available between each of those options?

Carmen Logue 00:15:10 Yeah, sure. And, that's I think an important question because, you know, I think as we extend into other parts of the organizations that we work with, this whole idea of open and having embedded capabilities, is important. And I think as we extend, we broaden the amount of work that our team needs to do. So in terms of building products, the other side of that is that, or the other aspect of that, is that we know that our customers have tools that they're already using, that they want to keep using. So that's important too. But I think that the decisions that we make around when to build and when to partner, are largely based in trying to get a deep understanding of what the needs are of these end-users, and also kind of building on our strengths. So InterSystems has a lot of key strengths, things that we've been working on for decades. And we want to continue to emphasize those while we add capabilities potentially more quickly with partner products in areas that are not key strengths for us, like reporting, right? I think that's a good example. Or API management, right? That's been a very successful partnership that has been around for a couple of years. And I think, you know, the reality is we've always done partnerships. They just probably haven't been quite as visible as they are now, but it does really allow us to extend the platform, get things to market more quickly, but still maintain the ability of our customers to count on InterSystems for support, for making sure these things work together, and for looking at things in the long haul. So it just simplifies for a lot of our customers and partners, the decisions that they have to make about which solutions to include. So, yeah, definitely not decisions that we take lightly. This is something that we really try to think about where our strengths are and, you know, what the end-users really need.

Derek Robinson 00:17:23 So definitely. Yeah.

Benjamin De Boe 00:17:24 And also, where does it fit with the other party? Because we look at these in isolation, each time, not just that they're technology, but also if there is a business fit, if these are people that are in it for the long run, just like us. This is really focused on, are we doing the target users a favor by offering this as a combined package? That's really what we're aiming for with these partnerships. And I think API management, reports have been great examples of how we can combine the strengths of our data platform with a particular complementary capability that our customers—our customers that we know well—were looking for. So those are really good examples where it's been working excellently.

Derek Robinson 00:18:16 Yeah. And just to add one more, and I know that that is in your ballpark, Tom, is like our partnership with Data Robot, for example, where another partner has good experience and expertise in machine learning, and we can roll that in with the service and products that we offer, right?

Thomas Dyar 00:18:32 Yeah, absolutely. Data Robot is a category leader, a creator of a whole category of auto ML for enterprise. So they're really, they know their stuff in machine learning, and we have a seamless integration, and many different ways that we can support getting data that people aggregate normalized in our platform and then utilize, get insights, drive predictions using Data Robot machine learning models that they can create. So it really can work well.

Derek Robinson 00:19:07 Right. For sure. So, looking at kind of all of those partnerships and technologies that we've made ourselves, it can be a lot to look at everything that's available. And I know Carmen, you had mentioned in your last answer there kind of identifying what solutions are right to use for a given person. So, Benjamin, kind of looking at what a typical customer might be using, are they using everything that we have, or are they using a subset, kind of one thing? What's the typical usage for a customer within this entire umbrella of analytics and AI products and features?

Benjamin De Boe 00:19:40 It would be great if there would be a customer that uses everything. But it's like walking into a home improvement store. You don't need a thing from each and every aisle. You may think that you need something. Or if I think that I need something from every aisle, but usually it really comes down to the scenario that they're after. So if you are a supply chain management application developer, and you want the real-time view on where your goods are, then InterSystems IRIS BI is the perfect solution for that because of the of interaction with our persistent data. It will give you exactly that. If you are a big investment bank who needs to cater to a very broad audience that uses different tools already, and you really have this huge data volume that you can't possibly have indices for each and every dimension, then InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics would be a terrific solution for that kind of use case. So it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. Then of course, the broader our footprint as a customer, the more likely it is that they'll be using multiple tools and we've made that they work well together, but it really depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Derek Robinson 00:20:52 Right, right. So, yeah. So I think certainly, you know, customers leveraging as much as they can and being able to maximize the benefit that they're getting out of their situation and the tools that are available to them. Tom, I know you've worked with a particular customer who does this really well, if you want to share briefly about that.

Thomas Dyar 00:21:08 Yeah. We work very closely with Bay State Health, which is a large healthcare provider in the western half of Massachusetts. And, you know, they are leveraging a whole host of our technologies with aggregating and collecting healthcare data from millions of patients, and then being able to take that data along with information that they might have about their patients, not only their history of all that, their medications and encounters in the health system, but whatever data they can bring together and try to predict things about care, about cost of care. And also in this time of COVID, being able to optimize their operations wherever they find some needs, and having a platform that can put the data together and then also develop machine learning models for these kinds of applications is really critical for them.

Derek Robinson 00:22:10 Right, right. Nice. That's awesome. So looking at everything we've talked through in all these great products and features, I wanted to end with a quick kind of, around the table here, where do you see things going next? And what's the future within this area of the product and the technology? So Carmen, we can start with you.

Carmen Logue 00:22:26 Sure. Yeah. And I'll give you a very biased to answer because I'm really excited about what's coming out with Adaptive Analytics. And so I really think that this idea of being able to use the same platform for transactional and analytic data workloads is going to be something that people, that our customers, will really be able to leverage. And I think it will show them good cost of ownership as well as additional capabilities.

Derek Robinson 00:22:56 Right. Nice Benjamin, your thoughts?

Benjamin De Boe 00:22:59 We're working on making analytical querying faster for you. So we're really excited about the preliminary results received. It's really an order of magnitude kind of improvement for these queries. So, can't promise a specific version number just yet, but stay tuned, probably around Virtual Summit, we'll have a lot more to say about this.

Derek Robinson 00:23:20 Nice. That's exciting. And Tom, what about you?

Thomas Dyar 00:23:22 Yeah, I think for IntegratedML and for machine learning within our platform, we want to support more of the variety of data, different data types that you can store and be able to learn about, as well as the volume. We want to be able to support ever-larger collections of data. So those are two very important aspects that we're going to be improving and increasing our capabilities going forward.

Derek Robinson 00:23:52 Great. So Carmen, Benjamin, and Tom, thank you so much. It's been a great overview, I think, of the entire umbrella here that we're looking at. So, looking forward to deeper dives into these in the future. So thanks for joining us.

Carmen Logue 00:24:02 Thanks for having us, Derek.

Derek Robinson 00:24:09 So thanks again to Carmen, Benjamin, and Tom for joining us for that discussion. Hopefully that provided a little more context around the products and features within the analytics and AI domain here at InterSystems. For more information, you can always refer to the main InterSystems website, intersystems.com, for information about product releases. For deeper dives into these technologies, keep an eye on learning.intersystems.com for new materials on these topics as we develop them. That'll do it for episode 17. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, hear from Jeff Fried — the director of product management for data platforms at InterSystems — about InterSystems being named a visionary in Gartner's first ever magic quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on this episode, I'll chat with Jeff Fried, the Director of Product Management for Data Platforms at InterSystems, about InterSystems being named a vision in Gartner's new cloud DBMS Magic Quadrant.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Hopefully you've had a happy beginning to 2021. In this episode, our first of the new year, I'll be chatting with Jeff Fried about a recognition InterSystems recently received, and what it means from a technology standpoint. Now you may have seen in other materials that InterSystems has been named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Operational Database Management Systems for the second year in a row. This has been mentioned at our Global Summits and our Virtual Summits, and it's something that InterSystems is definitely proud of. While that  recognition holds a lot of weight, there's another one that's very new related to Gartner that I'll be talking to Jeff about, and that's being named a visionary in Gartner's first ever Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.

Derek Robinson 00:01:29 All right. And welcome to the podcast Jeff Fried, our Director of Product Management for Data Platforms here at InterSystems. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us.

Jeff Fried 00:01:36 I'm delighted, Derek. It's always good to talk to you.

Derek Robinson 00:01:37 Of course. So today we're talking about some topics around Gartner and the Magic Quadrant, specifically for Gartner. So over the past two years, both 2019 and 2020, InterSystems has been named a Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Operational Database Management Systems, or ODBMS. That info has been displayed a lot in our marketing a lot in our website, even in our learning materials, at conferences, everything else. But one of the new things for 2020 is that Gartner released their first ever Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems. And InterSystems has been named a visionary in that Magic Quadrant, which is really exciting and interesting. So as the Director of Product Management for Data Platforms, can you tell us a little bit about what that recognition means from a technology standpoint for InterSystems?

Jeff Fried 00:02:27 Sure. I'll start just by parsing what you said, which is that Gartner as a big market analyst firm has a variety of these things. The Customers' Choice is really exactly that; it's talking to customers and getting their perspective and it's really, really gratifying to get such top marks. So that's really real-world mileage. How well does our support work? How well does the product work in production? The Magic Quadrants And the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Systems is the first time.  Historically they have had a different thing for operational database, if you will, transactional stuff, and one for analytic databases, which is much more the OLAP and the analysis kind of tools. And this is the first time that they're together. And it's also the first time that it's explicitly cloud. So from a technology standpoint, that's a lot, and being a visionary there is very exciting. The analytics elements that they picked up on and highlighted, include things that we've been doing for a long time: very high speed ingest, strong security, strong workload management, but they also include areas that are a big investment for us now, such as advanced analytics or machine learning.

Derek Robinson 00:04:13 Right, right. Nice. And so, yeah, it seems like, that crosses with a lot

of the things that we've, you know, our best foot forward in many areas when it comes to IRIS and the things that we've promoted.  

Jeff Fried 00:04:26 Yeah, absolutely. The way that I think about this is that this represents recognition of success in areas that we may not have been traditionally in. I mean, InterSystems has a long and illustrious history, and we're best known for these operational transactional things, which are frankly much harder because of data integrity needs than some of the analytic cases. One of the things that Gartner does that I, as a nerd, like from the numbers standpoint, is they do divide things up then into use cases. So when you're building a platform, it's hard; we're building for builders, and they can do all kinds of things with it. But in particular, along with the Magic Quadrant, there's things called critical capabilities. So there's a set of use cases. For analytics, the new area to us, there's ratings of a bunch of capabilities and how they apply to a traditional data warehouse, to a logical data warehouse, to data science and machine learning, and to operational intelligence. And that, you know, it's all designed so customers can change the weights themselves, but the areas that are new from a technology perspective, like advanced analytics and multi-cloud, and the sort of financial governance elements, gained us a pretty strong position in logical data warehouse in areas where you have data that might be spread around and you want to use it for analytic cases, as well as nearly top of class in what's called operational intelligence, which is sort of a buzz word for being aware of what's happening in your operations, being smart about it, and being able to get both insight and action from that. The other side of this as a first-time thing was the cloud. This is explicitly cloud, and in a way it's Gardener's bias that they are highlighting that so much new business is moving to the cloud and that the complete majority, if you will, is already there. We are frankly, late to the cloud compared to some players. So there was even question in Gartner's minds about whether we should be included at all, based on their perception of what we're doing in the cloud. And then when we really got into it, they were very surprised. And frankly, I was surprised at exactly how much cloud work is really happening. We have a lot of customers that are running in the cloud. We have quite a number of partners that are running SAS services. We're rolling out our own SAS services and platform services. So even though we're late to the cloud, if you will, I think we have a very strong showing for that. And that's really what gave us a visionary position.

Derek Robinson 00:08:13 That's great. And I mean, in Learning Services, we've been involved in some of the stuff around that cloud offering as well. And you're right. It's been the last couple of years really that we've moved to having offerings on AWS and GCP and Azure and kind of things that just three or four years ago, weren't really a part of our offering at that point. But with those things in mind, what are some of those elements you see shifting in the future that will drive us more and more to cloud-friendly technologies, and how InterSystems is prepared to keep growing in that regard and be able to maintain that leader or visionary stance in that space?

Jeff Fried 00:08:50 Yeah. I'd say two things come to mind. One is a continuation of what we've already been doing. So as you mentioned, we already are present in these cloud marketplaces. It turns out that we have customers on every major cloud. And there is a very strong trend towards what are called orchestrators — ways that you can set up your system — so that given the cloud where you can add machines at will, and add resources, so that the topologies dynamically change, so that you can manage them along with your applications in a single fabric, if you will. And Kubernetes is probably by far the most common orchestrator; that's now something that every cloud has their own service, you know, there's, the Amazon Kubernetes service, the Azure Kubernetes services, the Google Kubernetes engine, they all are based upon this open-source orchestrator. So containers and Kubernetes are not just fads. And we've been investing in them for a couple of years. It's still the case that many of our customers don't really understand how to work with these technologies. And there are things that we still need to learn 'cause it's working very fast, but the path there in the market is more and more of a shift towards this kind of orchestrated architecture, and to things where you don't set up how many machines you're going to have ahead of time. You say, here's the work I need done, and the system adjusts to the work. So that's one front. The market is definitely shifting in this direction. There's a lot around server lists, or what a Lambda architecture is, that you can accommodate if you are working in one of these orchestrators. The other area is around using this and other cloud technologies to do more interesting architectural things. I mean, we're doubling down on a lot of our traditional strengths — on ingest, on high availability through mirroring, on consistency, on scale-out — but the cloud offers things like object store, low-cost facilities for storing data, that may not be fast and easy to access the way that we're used to with disks and SANs, but is good for certain classes of data. So we'll be investing in that area. It also offers much quicker access to things that you could get on prem to — what's an example of that? — GPU-based servers Because GPU's are used heavily in machine learning; it's all math. And people don't tend to buy and have GPU's lying around in their data centers, but you can get them easily in the cloud. Same thing with, you know, alternate architectures, like, there's a big push towards ARM, both at Amazon and Apple. So, we'll be taking advantage of those in a way that's still portable across cloud. So you know, one of my ground rules is that we want to have the same blueprint, the same architecture running, in whichever cloud you're running in, or on-prem. Gardner in their Magic Quadrant calls this multi-cloud, meaning, you may be running in different clouds in different geographies because of the presence or the regulations. You might not want to get too invested in any cloud provider because that's part of their game. Then you have a dependency. And I think as an independent, we are not Amazon Google or Microsoft, you have the advantage that we can work with any of them.

Derek Robinson 00:13:37 Right. And building our platform so that it can work with any of those. And to one of your earlier points, I remember actually at a prior Global Summit, one of our colleagues, Anton, and you were doing a presentation about that very topic of a machine learning model, for instance, that you need to really run some intensive training on it that requires a lot of GPU machine power, and you're not going to go buy, you know, 20 machines to do a small amount of training that you're going to do. And so being able to deploy in cloud environments to use it as needed and be able to be efficient with your spending as a business, when you're using that type of computing resource, you know, that's an important element of it as well.

Jeff Fried 00:14:14 Exactly. And Anton, I think, would be a great person to have on your podcast. And he's continued on with the SageMaker integration that we showed there. And it's a great example where you may not need GPU's permanently; you may just need to rent them for an hour.

Derek Robinson 00:14:33 So yeah, so just a final question, kind of moving into, I think you talked about this a lot already, but, you know, you mentioned Kubernetes, you mentioned kind of our being multi-cloud. Any specific features that you have kind of on the forefront or that you see as having been recently released or coming out that really play this cloud presence specifically?

Jeff Fried 00:14:53 Well, I think, our InterSystems Kubernetes operator, or IKO — rolls right off your tongue — is definitely something to highlight. We've had to do a significant amount of work sort of in the basement of the system, and on the way it's configured, in order to fit into this orchestration framework. And we released this with 2020.3. I think that might be worth having another podcast about, and it's really nice to see, we have a few customers running on it now and a lot more that are headed this way. The trick with any orchestrator, it's like…it's automation. So you have to set things up ahead of time and just like, think of automated testing. It may not be quicker for you to run the test the first time, but it's much quicker the second and third and fourth time. So, only a few of our customers are really familiar with Kubernetes in the areas that we've been working with them on, but we're running with it on some of our own systems. And we have some really big customers that are already using it. So I think that's worth a highlight.

Derek Robinson 00:16:23 Nice. So exciting stuff. And hopefully we'll continue to position ourselves well in that cloud database management system space. So, Jeff Fried, thanks so much for joining us. We'll talk to you next time.

Jeff Fried 00:16:33 Great. Thank you.

Derek Robinson 00:16:39 So many thanks to Jeff for spending some time to talk with me about being a visionary in the cloud DBMS Magic Quadrant and some of the InterSystems technologies that we will continue to see in that effort to support the journey toward a seamless and intuitive fit in the cloud. In future episodes, I think we'll definitely explore more about things like containers and the Kubernetes operator, both foundational pieces to InterSystems cloud-native approach. But for now, that'll do it for Episode 16. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, hear about the InterSystems ObjectScript extension in Visual Studio Code that allows developers to easily connect to their InterSystems IRIS instances and write ObjectScript in a familiar and lightweight environment. Product Manager Raj Singh joins Zack Krowiak to discuss this topic in detail!

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, you'll hear an interview between Zack Krowiak and Raj Singh about the ObjectScript extension in Visual Studio Code.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode 15 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. If you caught our last episode, you heard about the Experience Labs that we held during Virtual Summit. If any of those caught your interest, be on the lookout — we're converting those labs into exercises that will be available in our learning catalog. So you can head over to learning.intersystems.com to check it out. In today's episode, my colleague Zack Krowiak will interview Product Manager Raj Singh. Raj is a Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. And one topic that falls squarely into that area is the ObjectScript extension for Visual Studio Code. This extension allows developers to work seamlessly in a familiar, free, and lightweight IDE like VS Code. So without further ado, here's Zack's interview with Raj.

Zack Krowiak 00:01:27 All right. Raj Singh, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

Raj Singh 00:01:31 Thanks for having me.

Zack Krowiak 00:01:33 Yeah, so let's get started. So could you start by talking a little bit about how this project evolved from an open-source project, with Dmitriy, to a community collaboration with InterSystems?

Raj Singh 00:01:43 Yeah, so it was, this is pretty much a new process for InterSystems. We dipped our toes in the water earlier in 2019 with some open-source releases around iKnow and some other smaller things, less visible, but tackling an IDE, which is something all of our developers touch almost every day, if not multiple times a day, was a big commitment. A lot went into that decision, but that was partly mitigated by the fact that the ObjectScript extension that Dmitriy Maslennikov had already launched, had already shown a lot of popularity. There was hundreds of installs. People were using it every day. So from that perspective, it wasn't too scary. But just from a process perspective, we bank our reputation on sterling customer support and reliability, and so those kinds of things are easier to achieve when you have more control. So going to embracing open-source introduced a lot of degrees of freedom that we didn't know if we could be comfortable with. So we went into this with a good amount of research that showed that Visual Studio Code was a really solid platform. Very popular. Developers were coming to it in droves — first development platform to garner over 50% usage rate across the whole developer ecosystem, that I've ever seen, in years and decades, probably. So there are a lot of strong signs pointing to Visual Studio Code being a terrific platform to build upon. And then we had some of those signals that the ObjectScript extension that Dmitriy had created was also a good place for us to start. And so we went into the spring with the decision to try this out, and we would see how it would go in terms of our culture fitting in with the community culture, and having that collaboration process work well. You can't know until you try it out.

Zack Krowiak 00:04:03 Wow. That's great. Thank you. And yeah, you mentioned support a

little bit there, and how this presents a unique opportunity and challenge for supporting a product because it is open source. Could you talk a little bit more about that, and how getting support for this extension works?

Raj Singh 00:04:17 Yeah. And this will be a bit confusing for us and probably a little confusing for customers, at least at first, but this there's going to be a new model for this. First of all, for

those of you who may be long-term customers, you can always do what you've always done.

Call in to WRC, talk to your favorite rep, and really get help through whatever problems you're having. But we'd also like you to consider first going to GitHub Issues and starting your support journey there. First of all, because if you're having a problem, somebody else probably is having the same problem. So you can probably get a lot of insight just immediately, in the middle of the night or whatever. You might even solve it on your own. Secondly, if you're having a problem, somebody else, even if they haven't reported an issue, is probably having the problem today or might have it in a month, and you can pay it forward and help somebody else out down the road by keeping your journey around fixing your issue in the public. So that is a lot of reasons why we should start with GitHub Issues whenever you have a problem. You definitely want to put enhancement requests on GitHub Issues, because that is where they're going to be triaged. This is a community project in the open completely. And so the project management committee, which is going to review all the enhancement requests and figure out whether or not to work on them, that's all going to happen in the open, and only things that are on GitHub Issues are going to be considered.

Zack Krowiak 00:06:04 Right. Thank you. So you go to GitHub to both put support requests and also provide your feedback, and that's all through the same streamlined approach?

Raj Singh 00:06:15 Yeah. For those of you who are GitHub veterans,  you'll get that pretty easily, but for those of you who are new to it, it may feel a little bit foreign at first, but you should quickly get comfortable with it. So issues is maybe a little bit of a misnomer; it's a place to start a discussion on a particular topic. And then as that topic evolves, it could go from a bug report to an enhancement request if you filed it wrong in the first place, or it could go the other way. The important thing is that if there's some friction in your experience, if there's some problem you're having, or something you just want to say, is great. You always go to a single place, GitHub Issues.

Zack Krowiak 00:07:04 Right. Thank you for that. And yeah, I know you also mentioned before that you can actually access that the link to the GitHub right from VS Code, if you just go to the

extensions page. So could you talk a little bit…I'm curious a lot about the different elements

of the extension, or really extensions, now — I think there is now like four extensions that are

part of a bundle. In particular I'm interested in the language server. Could you talk a little bit more about that? What's the language server's role in this ObjectScript extension bundle?

Raj Singh 00:07:35 Yeah, so the language server is really what differentiates this from what

it was six months ago. The language server is a little piece of software that sits on your

computer, on the same computer as Visual Studio Code itself. But it's a separate executable. It's a separate little process running, and it mediates communication between your IDE and your IRIS or Caché server. And what it's doing is, as you type, every single character you type, it's going and figuring out on the back end in the database, whether there's some information it can provide to make your coding experience better. So what we see, what that means, is that if you want to do code completion, variable completion, get some documentation on a built-in class, or one that you've one that you've written yourself and have already compiled to the server, all that rich information comes through the language server, constantly being in communication with the server and knowing the whole class, the whole code base that's already in the server, and how basically the language interacts with the database. So the language server is…otherwise you would have to have all the smarts right in the extension. And A, first reason why that doesn't work well is that we can't ship your code inside the extension, so that wouldn't work well. And B, it's not an extensible way to do things. It would create a huge extension for you to work with. And it would have to be versioned for, it would have to be specific for every database version. So having a language server allows us to do amazing syntax coloring. It allows us to have your coding experience tailored directly to whatever version of IRIS or Caché you're using. So whatever classes exist on that instance of the server will be exposed to your programming environment through the language server. And in the future, it will allow you to even have languages within languages within languages colored perfectly. So if you're writing SQL inside an ObjectScript routine, those will be colored separately. You might be writing a Python routine inside of an ObjectScript class that will…the Python will be colored with Python syntax, the ObjectScript will be ObjectScript. All those things will be mediated through the language server.

Zack Krowiak 00:10:20 Wow. That sounds like it's going to be a massive boost to productivity, and just making your experience as a developer so much smoother insofar as you can just see the whole code base that you're working with. And all of those, like nested syntax, colorings, as you were talking about. so, I'm curious about a couple things. First of all, if I'm coming from the days of Atelier, can I still use Atelier? Or is Atelier being deprecated?

Raj Singh 00:10:51 Atelier is definitely being deprecated or sunset. It really, VS Code already does more than you can do at the Atelier, so there really is no reason for Atelier users to stay on that platform. The VS Code environment has been so successful. We've surpassed the Atelier functionality sooner than we expected. And so the official message is definitely, if you have been using Atelier, it's time to move; it's time to migrate as quickly as possible. And we've been giving that message to people who have asked, and we haven't had any pushback. So people who have tried out both are so happy to move on from that.

Zack Krowiak 00:11:37 Right. And I can say just as a user myself, the difference between the challenges of even just installing Atelier, on my version of Eclipse versus VS Code, it's night

and day getting VS Code up and running, and my IDE was, you know, a matter of two buttons,

and it was running. Now on the other side of things, what about Studio? Is that going to be sticking around?

Raj Singh 00:11:59 Studio will definitely be sticking around for a very long time. First of all, Studio just does things that the VS Code ObjectScript extension doesn't do, and may never do. All the low-code editors for the Interoperability/Ensemble products, just don't exist on Visual Studio Code yet. There are a lot of wizards in Studio that people have grown very used to, which the VS Code platform just works on a different metaphor. So I don't even know if we can bring, we definitely can't bring them in the same form to VS Code. We may be able to replicate them in the model that VS Code likes a little bit, and we'll continue to do that with code templates and things like that, but they're going to be different platforms for the foreseeable future, and they're going to have different strengths and weaknesses. And I think people who have grown accustomed to Studio will continue to use it for certain things. And they'll probably end up in a mixed environment, where I expect over the next couple of years, more and more mainstream ObjectScript development will probably be on VS Code, and Studio will still be there for custom…I don't want to say esoteric, but some more special-purpose needs.

Zack Krowiak 00:13:23 Right. So if you're working with wizards or some of those more kind of,

as you said, obscure needs that Studio offers, that's the way to go, but for your development work and your kind of regular coding, VS Code is going to do everything you need it to do. So one thing I was excitedly watching was the gradual release of the product. I remember getting to around Version 0.9, which seemed to have all the functionality. And then, that was in, I think, early September, before Version 1.0 came out in October. Could you talk a little bit about what changed between those versions?

Raj Singh 00:14:06 Well, the big change was the language server, which I just talked about. That took the product from kind of a toy to being a real production-quality thing. I don't want to denigrate it too much; it wasn't a toy, but the syntax coloring wasn't perfect. There were things that weren't colored right. There was very little inline documentation. Like I said, you don't want to build all the documentation for all the classes available, built-in classes in IRIS, into the extension. So there are a lot of things that were very limited. So getting the language server in there was the biggest change. And then there was so more testing going from 0.9 to 1.0. Throughout the summer, we expanded the user base, and InterSystems getting involved in the project attracted a lot more beta testers to it, gave them the confidence in it that they were willing to devote some time to it. So I would say the second biggest change from 0.9 to 1.0 is hardening the whole thing, having many more eyes on the product and tons of bug fixes and little tweaks and enhancements. And then the third big thing is the introduction of the server manager extension, which lets you…we changed the idea of how you configure your access to service in 0.9. In previous versions, you pretty much had one server that you could access. And if you wanted to access…you only had one server per project you could access. If you wanted to access a different server, start another project. 1.0 allows you to have multiple servers, multiple IRIS servers or Caché servers, hooked up to the same project and also allow you to use server-side source control instead of only client-side source control. So a host of new features, I would group them all under moving into the enterprise-level feature set. And so it definitely works the same. Most of it works exactly the same as 0.9, but much deeper and it'll take you a lot further. You won't max out on your ability to do your projects.

Zack Krowiak 00:16:28 Great. Yeah. There's so many things I've experienced there, but there's

still the things you're describing. I'm still excited to dig deeper in and try some of that out.

Raj Singh 00:16:37 Oh, I forgot the big one big one, which is encrypted password storage.

Prior to 1.0, you couldn't store your password encrypted. You could only use it for development environments. Cause you either had to store that password in plain text for your server, for your database server, or you had to type it in every time you connect it, which is a right pain.

Zack Krowiak 00:16:57 Yeah. That's a big one. Yeah, so what's next for VS Code, ObjectScript? What's the future hold?

Raj Singh 00:17:06 Well, I think this winter is going to be less big splashy features and more making it rock solid. We're going to, I think with 1.0 coming out, that will attract a lot more users to the product. And when you get a lot more people, you'll find some of the dark

corners, some things that don't work as well. So we'll spend a lot of time making it solid and

dependable. And then we're going to begin to look at some small new features and some

big new features. Somebody we're talking to this week during the Virtual Summit, our annual user conference, brought up the issue of code refactoring, which I think is a must-have. It's one of my favorite features of an IDE, which decades ago, when I started being a programmer, got me off at text editors, and to use a real IDE is…the idea that you can change a variable name, that the IDE would allow you to change a variable name, and it would change it everywhere it appeared in your project, or change a class method signature and change it everywhere it appeared in your project…those kinds of mass refactoring things are huge productivity boosts, so we need to get more of that in there. I think we're going to greatly expand the number of code snippets, which is VS Code's term for templating out boilerplate code. So that there's stuff you write all the time. And you don't want to type it in every time from the simplest thing like for loops or if/then statements to whole class signatures. If you're doing a REST implementation, there's a bunch of stuff that is boilerplate that you just need in there all at once. If you're extending a class, there's a bunch of boilerplate stuff. So we'll be taking a close look at what are the most useful things. And once again, jump on GitHub Issues and request your favorite boilerplate code templates. And we will work on building as much of those as we can.

Zack Krowiak 00:19:16 Right. Thank you. So, one last question I'm just wondering about…this is an open-source project. Does that mean that if I see a feature, I can theoretically do a pull request and try and develop myself? Are you encouraging users to do that as well if they have the time and motivation?

Raj Singh 00:19:33 Yeah, definitely. That would be great. That is the ideal state of any open-

source project, to have a huge, thriving developer community. And don't be intimidated. This is another great thing about the VS Code platform over Eclipse. You can get into programming for it very easily. So for example, writing extension is hard. It involves TypeScript programming; and understanding the whole code base can be very complicated, but as I mentioned, the boilerplate code, that is something which is done simply through writing a single JSON file, and you can even do user-specific code templates. So you can create your own little JSON file that works in VS Code without even submitting it to the main open-source project for inclusion in the whole product. And we have a document available in the GitHub Repo called contributing.md that shows you how to set up your Visual Studio Code environment for development instead of just use. But yeah, it's pretty easy to get started and there are steps to get you…dip your toes in the water and get you more and more involved in being a code contributor. And then on the governance side, we've set up a process for accepting those types of contributions, and having you become more and more a part of the project. You can get involved as much or as little as you want to be in the development side of this thing.

Zack Krowiak 00:21:10 Great. So yeah, the future looks like tightening it up in the short term, making sure that we address any support cases as they come, of course, invariably with any new technology, and then a little further down the line, adding some of those features like code refactoring. Raj Singh, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Raj Singh 00:21:32 Yeah, thanks. I can't wait to see what people do with this platform, not just from a user perspective, but this is a product for developers and by developers. And I hope to have a lot of developers join us on making it better.

Derek Robinson 00:21:50 So thanks again to Raj and Zack for having that conversation about VS

Code. The extension is definitely a great breakthrough for making development on InterSystems technologies easier and more intuitive. So we encourage you to check that out if you haven't already. That'll do it for Episode 15, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, you'll hear about the experience labs that are planned for the 2020 Virtual Summit!

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services.

Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll be giving you a preview of the five different Experience Labs created by Learning Services that you can look forward to at the 2020 Virtual Summit.

Derek Robinson 00:00:40 Welcome to Episode 14 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. In this episode, it'll just be me, no guests on the podcast today. Our whole team here in Online Learning always ramps up during the summer every year, in preparation for the Global Summit. Many of you listening have probably attended Global Summits in the past. Every year it's a chance for InterSystems partners and customers to come together and learn, collaborate, and network, and share their experiences with InterSystems products and anything else in their careers. Of course, given the global pandemic, things are different this year; everything's virtual, and thus it is the 2020 Virtual Summit that's happening this year in October and early November. Links in the podcast description will get you to the important information. But today I want to run through the five different Experience Labs that our team has been working on and will be offering at this year's Virtual Summit.

Derek Robinson 00:01:31 Experience Labs are something that you may have attended at past summits if you have frequented Global Summits in the past for InterSystems. They're designed to be 45-minute hands-on exercises that typically focus on a new and exciting feature within the InterSystems stack of technologies. The five labs that we're offering this year cover the topics of FHIR, IntegratedML, Visual Studio Code and ObjectScript, InterSystems Reports, and HealthShare Provider Directory. So let's start with FHIR. Formally, this one's called Building FHIR Applications with InterSystems API Manager. This lab is meant for healthcare developers. In the exercise, you'll learn how to use InterSystems API Manager to view APIs to write FHIR applications. More specifically, the application that you build in this exercise will query for observations that may predict the severity and progression of COVID-19, retrieving data from a FHIR server over REST. So it's a topical use case for sure. InterSystems IRIS for Health provides a base FHIR server implementation with a FHIR resource repository. And for this exercise, we've pre-configured a FHIR R4 server on an IRIS for Health instance, pre-populating its FHIR resource repository with some sample patient data. And notably, this lab has already been taken by some people, and one person remarked that it's a three-for-one lab, meaning that you get FHIR, IRIS for Health, and API Manager, all in one. So that's pretty cool. The team working on the FHIR lab has consisted of Craig Lee, Patrick Jamieson, Jenny Ames, Adam Coppola, and Duong Do.

Derek Robinson 00:03:02 Next up, we have Hands-On with IntegratedML. If you attend other sessions at Virtual Summit, you're bound to come across IntegratedML as one of the new features being discussed. This lab is designed for developers who have a good grasp of SQL and want to integrate machine learning into their applications. The exercise will guide you through the steps, all of which are simple SQL commands with very familiar syntax, to create, train, and execute a predictive model on a set of patient data to predict patient readmissions. You'll learn a bit about the data preparation that goes on before implementing machine learning as well. But at the core of the exercise, the objective is to remove the barriers to machine learning by integrating it straight into the relational data access in InterSystems IRIS. The exercise is contained within an Apache Zeppelin notebook, so it's super easy to click and run commands, play around with your own, move at your own pace, really explore the lab and IntegratedML as a feature. I personally worked on this lab and designed quite a bit of it, and I'm excited to see others benefit from it. The others on the team who worked with me were Tom Dyar, Benjamin De Boe, and David Lepzelter.

Derek Robinson 00:04:10 Another lab being offered is Developing ObjectScript with Visual Studio Code. Now this one is pretty widely applicable to any developers that use InterSystems technology. In this lab, you'll go step by step through installing Visual Studio Code and managing the source code of an InterSystems IRIS server. For many of you who have used Studio or Atelier in the past, VS Code is really the current evolution of what is recommended. And it's a free platform that developers tend to be familiar with as well. Using the ObjectScript extension, you can become familiar with how to set things up, and be able to manage your code, connect it to a server. And one of the good things about this lab, in my opinion, is that coming out of it, you really have everything set up to connect and work with any InterSystems IRIS instance by simply updating really just a few configuration settings. So once you have Visual Studio Code set up, you're going to come out of this lab good to go and connect to any InterSystems IRIS instance. Raj Singh, Tim Leavitt, Adam Coppola, and Duong Do made up the team building this lab, and it looks great. Like I said, I tried it myself just yesterday.

Derek Robinson 00:05:12 Next we have Getting Started with InterSystems Reports. A little bit of a different focus here, as this one is targeted at data analysts and report designers for the most part. InterSystems Reports is a new tool in the analytics area, and this is another topic you'll likely hear about during Virtual Summit across other presentations. In fact, Episode Seven of this podcast featured Product Manager Carmen Logue, who gave a breakdown of what InterSystems Reports is in anticipation of it coming out. So definitely check out that episode if you're interested to learn more about this technology specifically. In this lab, you'll use both the InterSystems report designer and server to develop a banded report, a bar chart, and a cross- tab report. You'll also learn about how to publish this report to a server. This lab provides a good way to see how seamlessly InterSystems IRIS can connect to this simple reporting solution to make your data more digestible to your audiences. Carmen, of course, as I mentioned, was part of the team building this lab, along with Zack Krowiak and Duong Do.

Derek Robinson 00:06:10 Last, but certainly not least, we have Provider Directory: Sharing Clean Provider Data with FHIR. This lab is meant for data stewards, data architects, or health

insurance executives. In this exercise, you'll walk through Provider Directory from the perspective of a data steward for an insurance company. You'll view a provider record and dive into what source records contribute to that master record. Look at the record's history, see how updates to Provider Directory propagate to the Unified Clinician Registry in HealthShare. And you'll even test out FHIR endpoints exposed by Provider Directory. The team building this lab consists of Jim Derrickson, Zach Krowiak, and Jaising Pasten.

Derek Robinson 00:06:48 So those are the five Experience Labs, and we're really excited for learners to get the chance to do them. These labs will become available after the keynote sessions of Virtual Summit. So follow the links in this episode to register for the summit and get the information you need. The labs will be on demand. You can launch them and take them at any time during the Virtual Summit. And that time frame leads up to the week of November 2nd to 5th, when each lab will have two different time slots for office hours: one at noon Eastern time, and one at 10:30 pm Eastern time, to account for our global audiences. The full schedule of office hours is in the description of this podcast. So there's a nice little primer on what you can expect from the Experience Labs at Virtual Summit. We've been working hard to build these, and we're really excited for you all to try them. That'll do it for Episode 14, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, you'll hear a bit about what's going on within the Online Learning team. First, Michelle Spisak tells us about the monthly learning newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here! https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?name=NewsletterSignUp

Then, you'll hear from Jaising Pasten about his journey, his experiences since joining the team, and some of the items he's worked on recently. One of them, which he mentions, is a Provider Directory video about navigation and search. HealthShare customers can view it here: https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?name=PDFirstView

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson    00:00:02    Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, we're chatting with Michelle Spisak and Jaising Pasten, two of my colleagues on the Online Learning team, for a look inside Online Learning. 

Derek Robinson   00:00:43    Welcome to Episode 13 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Today's episode is the first in what may be a recurring type of episode every once in a while, called What's New in Online Learning? The idea behind an episode like this one is to take a look behind the scenes of the Online Learning team as we build content and work on projects aimed to better equip learners of our technology. In the first half of the episode, I'll talk to Michelle Spisak, an Instructional Designer on the team, about the monthly learning newsletter. Then I'll chat with fellow course developer Jaising Pasten, about what his experiences have been since joining the Online Learning team after spending several years in the InterSystems Chile office, working on TrackCare, learning, and implementation. So without further ado, here's Michelle.  

Derek Robinson    00:01:26    All right, and welcome to the podcast, Michelle Spisak, Instructional Designer here at InterSystems. Michelle, how's it going?

Michelle Spisak: It's good, Derek, how are you doing?

Derek Robinson: I'm doing great. We're very happy to have you on for a little bit different of an episode today. We're really focusing within Learning Services and talking about some of the things that we have going on. So obviously you have, you know, a lot of different responsibilities in your role here at InterSystems in the Learning Services team as an Instructional Designer, but we're going to focus today on your role with the Learning Services newsletter. So first question kind of just for the audience that may not be familiar with it and may not know what it is, tell us what the Learning Services newsletter is and why we began offering it in the first place.  

Michelle Spisak    00:02:02    Yeah, so the newsletter is just basically a way for our clients and partners to stay up to date with what Learning Services is coming out with. So on the Online team, we're always coming out with new videos and learning paths, and other things like that. Documentation has been working really hard to modernize their website and make it even easier for people to find what they really need, really quickly. And so we just want to make sure that people know about everything that they're doing there. And then finally, in the classroom with all the changes that we've had lately with, you know, quarantine and policy changes at a federal and also local level, we want to make sure that people know exactly what our policies are in terms of the classroom offerings that we have, and also classes that are coming up so that they know, you know, new ways that they can learn. And so once a month, what we try to do is put out this newsletter, just letting everybody know, you know, everything we have going on, because like I said, it's a lot. 

Derek Robinson    00:03:04    Yeah. And I think that serves an important purpose because I think for a lot of developers and end users of our software, they might group together all three of those groups you just said, right? Like Classroom Training, Documentation, Online Learning...a little bit of a look behind the curtain. You know, those are different groups. And so this is an important thing to consolidate information from those sources. So very cool. So the newsletter started about four years ago, and so I know over time that's developed, it's gained some subscribers. We had a few things with like GDPR and you had to change some lists, lots of evolution over the course of time, but what are some of the recent improvements that you've made this year to be able to make it more effective for the recipients of that newsletter?  

Michelle Spisak    00:03:42    Yeah. Like you said, we've been doing a lot lately in terms of kind of slimming it down, streamlining it. We used to include like pretty substantial descriptions of all the different resources so that people had an exact idea of what we were offering, but we found that that's not really necessary for people to know whether or not they want to check out a resource. So what we try to do is make it as easy as possible for people to find, you know, "Oh, this is a video that I'm definitely gonna want to know about. I really need to know more about, you know, FHIR APIs or whatever."  And so we started really streamlining it, first of all, putting, you know, the things that we think will be most popular up front. And then also from time to time, we've kind of brought in another voice, like for example Jim Breen, the director of Learning Services worldwide, has provided an intro, just a little letter, so that he can kind of speak directly to our clients and partners and say like, "Hey, this is, you know, what we're doing. We know everybody's facing a lot of uncertainty right now, but you know, we're trying to keep people informed about Learning Services and always bring new information to everybody about our products and technologies. So that's kind of what we've done so far. In the future, what we'd really like to do is continue to modernize the newsletter, you know, kind of update the look and feel a little bit. So subscribers will definitely start to see a little bit more in terms of fun features, new ways that they can engage with the newsletter. Instead of just, you know, reading it, here's a way that you can interact with it a little bit more. So we're trying a couple different things and it's panned out so far. People seem to really be responding well. So yeah, hopefully that continues. 

Derek Robinson    00:05:32    Nice. Yeah, that's great. And I mean, I think for anybody who's familiar with the learning.intersystems.com website, there's a ton of content on there, right? Like there's lots of past Global Summit presentations and videos and courses and, you know,  we have so much content on there that sometimes it might not be easy to actually identify quickly, like what's new, like what has changed maybe, what some new topic that I might be interested in. So I think newsletter is a great way to distill that for people to understand what they might be missing if they haven't been on the Learning site in a month or something like that, you know.

Michelle Spisak: That's exactly it!  

Derek Robinson  00:06:07 So speaking of that, with this month's newsletter, what are some of the cool things that people might be interested in, some of the other, any ones that particularly jump out at you for content that you included in this one? 

Michelle Spisak    00:06:15    Yeah, so absolutely. I mentioned you know, that we're trying new features to help people kind of get engaged. One of the things that we tried this month is to, and, we'll continue it in the future, is to provide a spot for people to contribute what we're calling their "quick wins." So little ways that they found, little tips and tricks that they found, that are helpful for using InterSystems products and technologies that they want to share. There's always space for this in the Developer Community, you know, to share your little tips and tricks and stuff, but we would love to start including some of those in the newsletter so that readers can get just, you know, alongside all of the updates about, you know, what we're doing lately, here's also something from your peers who are saying, "This is how I've used InterSystems technology to help me in my job." 

Derek Robinson Nice! 

Michelle Spisak    00:07:08    Right. Yeah. So that should be a fun thing that we're starting now.  We'd love to get feedback on that, anybody's stories out there. And then also there's lots of videos this month. New videos about new technology that we think is really gonna help people, like InterSystems Reports. There's a couple of videos on Provider Directory. There's actually one use-case video that's really cool that shows an automated receipt processor, which might not be directly relevant to everybody in their position, but it's cool to see how people are using InterSystems technology in their own jobs. And maybe there are ways that it can spur on, you know, new ideas. 

Derek Robinson    00:07:47    Right. Nice, nice. That's a lot of interesting stuff for people, both, you know, heavy users of our products and also people that maybe are newer and evaluating and just kind of looking at it and exploring it. So I think that's a lot of good content. All right. So last question. How can we subscribe to the newsletter, and also, what can we expect in the future from the newsletter going forward?  

Michelle Spisak    00:08:05    So, first of all, to subscribe to the newsletter, we'll put a link in the show notes so that people can just very easily just click to subscribe. There's also a little link on learning.intersystems.com. If you go there and just click Learning News on the home page, it's just a really quick and easy way to get there. So we try to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up. And then in terms of things that people can expect to see, I touched on this a little bit, we're going to be updating the look and feel again to just kinda modernize things, make it, you know, even more pleasing to look at every month. And then also we're always looking for feedback. So if there are things that people want to see more of or, you know, new features that they think would be cool, we're happy to provide that. In the past we've done kind of a who's who of Learning Services, let people see, you know, who are actually the people who are creating all of the material that they read.  If you want to see something like that or something else that you think would be interesting, we're always looking for feedback, again. So feel free to shoot us a quick email about that. 

Derek Robinson    00:09:10    Yeah, for sure. All feedback and all suggestions are welcome.

Michelle Spisak    Yes, absolutely.

Derek Robinson   So Michelle, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you soon! 

Michelle Spisak    00:09:16    Yeah. Thanks Derek.  

Derek Robinson    00:09:22    Thanks to Michelle for taking the time there. Next we have Jaising. I recap Jaising's journey a bit in the opening question here, but he definitely has an interesting story, and I believe he's actually the first guest we've had on whose first language is not English. So lots of credit to him for being willing to join us. I think he did a great job. Here's my interview with Jaising. 

Derek Robinson    00:09:45    Alright, so welcome to the podcast Jaising Pasten, Online Course Developer here at InterSystems. Jaising, how's it going?

Jaising Pasten Very good! What about you?

Derek Robinson: Pretty good, thanks. And we're happy to have you on, your first time doing a podcast here, probably a little blend of nervousness and excitement, I'm guessing.

Jaising Pasten Yeah. Both of them.

Derek Robinson: For sure. So to give the listeners a little bit of background, Jaising, you joined the team about a year ago, I think, or maybe a little bit less, the Online Learning team here at InterSystems, is that right?

Jaising Pasten: In November.

Derek Robinson:  In November, it'll be one year. So, and you spent the past five years or so in Chile at the InterSystems office in Chile, and you were working on a lot of implementation stuff, being able to create training for the people doing implementations of InterSystems products. And one thing that you started to get into was Learning Services material in a way, but you didn't really have the budget for it in Chile, being kind of a one-man show. So tell us a little bit about what that was like briefly, and then also what it's been like transitioning to the Cambridge office, where you're actually now part of a full Learning Services team with resources and processes at your disposal.

Jaising Pasten:  Yeah, well actually, I think it's a very huge change. I began with InterSystems, sorry, with Learning Services in Chile, with zero budget, but it's just because I tried to resolve a problem with the training in Chile. Nobody are prepared to do the training in Chile, so I talk with my manager at the moment and we discuss about it and he told me that, "yeah, go ahead," but I don't have money for it. So yeah, I receive an offer for, it takes a lot, maybe a year or more, and that's the way I arrived to Boston. And it was a very huge change because as I told you, I never worked with budget. So here, for example, the things that you have now, podcasts, the license, all are considered are like a basic thing. I didn't have it. 

Derek Robinson  00:11:56  Right, right. Nice. So, being able to leverage some of the software tools and, and kind of things that we've built into place, that can make the job a whole heck of a lot easier than doing everything yourself from design to production, to reviewing and releasing, right?

Jaising Pasten    00:12:09    Yeah. Well, that's another big change for me because all the Learning Service Chile was I (laughs).

Derek Robinson  Right, right!

Jaising Pasten 00:12:20  So now we have a very entire process, a powerful. Someone can review your job. I think it's very good. For example, when we have the ID review or text review. People that maybe don't know the product, that the way that we know, see the video or see the script and, and define if it's understandable. And actually for me, it's even better because you know, English is not my first language. I feel they're safe if someone seeing my job and, and define, because it's not the same, it's not the same when you talk or in your mind you think that the course and someone read that, sometimes different.

Derek Robinson    00:13:10    Right. Yeah. That was going to be one of my questions with, you know, you've mentioned before, you've you mentioned even before we started recording to me, you mentioned that English isn't your first language, and that is one of the adjustments you have to make in this move to the U.S. office, the move to a team that is fully really only speaking in English. And so it sounds like you kind of mentioned the text and ID reviews. Those are a couple of things that are, you know, course development lingo for us, but sort of the reviewing of the language and the writing in a video script that you might write, or a course section or an exercise. And it sounds like those are a couple of things that have really helped you as well.  

Jaising Pasten    00:13:49    Yeah, well, I say that not only for me, I mean, I don't speak English. I mean, I speak English, but it's not my first language. But even for the rest of the team, it's a good idea to have this process when someone can see your job because, it's not just, we're a worldwide company. We need that our job, our work be very good and enough. And if we need to review more than one time, it's fine. I think the process, it's a new experience for me, but all this process was syncing in a way that all the, all the parts work together. I cannot work without the Production team or the people who reviewed our script or, and so on. So I think the most important thing about Learning Service is that we work like a team.  

Derek Robinson    00:14:57    And so, so it sounds like a lot of those things have been able to help, you know, take what you were doing before and as a one-man operation really, and be able to implement it and kind of continue to work in the way that you really enjoy working, which is designing learning content and really paving a path for a learner to understand a topic, but having a lot more processes and tools and resources and teammates at your disposal. So that's really cool. 

Jaising Pasten    00:15:23     And, and actually another thing that I think I can help, I have another view because one of the things that most of the people say about the Learning Services, we work just for U.S. And that, I think that has been my value here. I always say that we are a worldwide learning service, so we need to be like a worldwide learning service. So I have been helping people translate some courses, adding closed captions in Spanish. Even I have been like a connector with people in South America with the U.S. because they contact me directly because it's easier. You know, it's not just the way that you talk. People in Latin America know me, so I be a contact for the rest of the Learning team. Actually, I speak both Spanish and Portuguese, so people from Brazil have contacted me to help them.  

Derek Robinson    00:16:35    Right. Yeah. And you're really kind of one of the only people on the team that has those connections to those areas of the world. So I think it's pretty cool to be able to step into that role. Last question here, just kind of shifting a little bit to maybe some stuff that you've been working on recently, just to give a little bit of light into kind of, you know, we, we have a bunch of course developers in our team and I think I'll, some of them have been on this podcast before and others will be joining us in future episodes to talk about what they work on. As I mentioned, I talked with Michelle before about what she's worked on. So what's a recent project that you've been working on and are kind of really interested in and might be able to share a little sneak peek of, of why it's important and what's been exciting about it? 

Jaising Pasten    00:17:15   My first course here was the Starting and Stopping the HealthShare. I need to confess that I didn't have experience in HealthShare because in Chile, I used to work with TrackCare. But I have been receiving a lot of help from you, from my manager, and all the team, to learn new features. And well, now I'm working with HealthShare too. And well, I currently working in Provider Directory, making different videos. Actually, I released the
Provider Directory Navigation and Search, where I show how to move through the Provider Directory. It's a very, overview video, but it's the first step if you don't know or you aren't familiar with the program. So we are going to have the entire first steps for Provider Directory in, I think in one month. 

Derek Robinson    00:18:25    Yeah. Great. That's awesome. So, good to see that after doing a lot of TrakCare, you can dive into new technologies and new products and be able to learn from colleagues. And I think it's one thing InterSystems does a great job of is having people within the company be very willing to lend a helping hand and be able to help people get up to speed on a topic when they really need to. So that's great to hear.  

Jaising Pasten    Yeah. Actually, I like to learn new features, or new software. Actually, I am very interested, interesting in learn about machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I think it's a new thing that is going to be the future for InterSystems too.

Derek Robinson   00:19:08  Definitely. I agree. So Jaising Pasten, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you soon.

Jaising Pasten  Thank you.

Derek Robinson   00:19:16   So hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode, a little bit of a look behind the curtain at the Online Learning team and what's going on. Make sure to not only subscribe to the podcast, if you haven't already, but to subscribe to the newsletter Michelle talked about earlier. That'll do it for episode 13. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.