Virtual Summit 2020 - Day 2 of the Data Platforms focus sessions

We've just finished the second day of focus sessions - with a LOT of great content!  With parallel tracks, it's hard to keep up - but one advantage of a virtual conference is that you can watch anything you missed on-demand!

In yesterday's blog (Highlights of Day 1), I covered most of the special announcements such as InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics and the FHIR Accelerator Service, so time to turn to a few broader strategic themes today.

Operations and System Management:   We're seeing more and more customers running in the cloud, as well as people that are employing modern deployment strategies on-prem.     Mark Bolinsky delivered CL003 Cloud Storage Strategies and CL004 Cloud Backup Strategies back-to-back today, providing a lot of great detail and insight for those using the cloud for production workloads.   We've also had an enthusiastic response around our new System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) module.  Check out DEV007 System Alerting & Monitoring and CL005 Distributed Deployments.   Monitoring made easy for your clusters attracted a good crowd - thanks to everyone who participated and contributed with questions!

Security:  InterSystems consistently gets high marks from customers and analysts around security, but most people think about this in terms of keeping our product secure.  We're doing that, of course, but we are also adding new security features.   Today's  SEC000 OCSP Stapling is a prime example. OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) provides stronger security but also impacts browser performance. With OCSP Stapling, the server checks the validity of the X.509 certificate and staples that status in the response to the browser, resulting in much faster response time AND strong security.

Machine Learning:  Last year we announced IntegratedML, an all-SQL, an embedded facility for Machine Learning in your applications. Now that the technology is generally available, Tom Dyar obviously had a busy day presenting a getting started session and more in-depth talks about working with H2O and DataRobot, a partner on a range of ML initiatives, also beyond IntegratedML. And that's on top of yesterday's use case from our early adopter Baystate. More about best practices for in-platform ML tomorrow!

Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence:   Our new Adaptive Analytics offering isn't the only big investment we're making to make you more successful with InterSystems IRIS for analytical use cases. Benjamin De Boe hosted an overview of our support for Data Warehousing and also got out his kitchen whiteboard to take you through some of the internals of our SQL engine. Moving up to end-user space, Mark Massias presented an overview of the freedom of choice we leave to users for BI and Reporting tools to visualize the data in your Data Warehouse. And finally, Carmen Logue hosted Mike Senatore from our partner BioReference Labs, who adopted our new Selective Cube Build feature to maximize the availability of their InterSystems IRIS BI environment. More about working with our new technology partner Alteryx in this kind of setting tomorrow!

Developer talk:  We had a few sessions today covering our great tooling to get data and applications into the IRIS data platform.  Harry covered modern techniques for using Change Data Capture to migrate data between databases.  If you build client applications, you'll want to check out Bob Kuszewki's guided tour Object, Relational, and Native client Java APIs.  Speaking of application development, Tim Leavitt's session on the ZPM package manager is a must-see for anyone who builds and deploys IRIS applications.

Interoperability & FHIR:

Matt Spielman provided a nice history of InterSystems involvement with FHIR going back to 2014 in the The Promise of FHIR session.  He outlined the FHIR roadmap for the next two years including bulk FHIR and FHIR analytics.   We've seen a real shift as FHIR takes hold - our FHIR requirements are being driven more and more by customers and less by InterSystems engineers.

InterSystems is continuing to put a lot of investment into enhancing our support for X12 and IP004: Showcasing New X12 Enhancements provided a quick overview of the new features, with demos of notable capabilities, including SNIP Level 1 and 2 validation and consolidated DTL support specifically for X12. 

 Stefan Wittmann provided a sneak peek to the latest additions to the HL7 Productivity toolkit in IP003: Becoming More Effective with HL7 Feeds.  InterSystems IRIS is now capable of generating DTL stubs based on inbound and outbound HL7v2 messages and enables Interface Developers to iteratively improve the DTL and retest. We expect this feature to provide another big boost to productivity. Another capability lets you validate productions across namespaces or instances for changed behavior, lowering the cost of upgrades significantly.

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) launched a year ago and since then we have seen many partners adopting this new capability of the InterSystems IRIS Database Platform. It comes with no surprise that IAM has been covered in more depth today. "IP002: Getting you up to speed on InterSystems API Manager" provided a quick tour of the main features of IAM for those that didn't have a chance to explore IAM yet and discussed the new features that the next release IAM 1.5.0.3 will include. Stefan also discussed IP001: Best Practices for IAM, exploring ways to achieve high availability and provide the best granular control over your API traffic.

Looking Ahead:  Tomorrow will wrap up the Focus Sessions and we expect to finish strong.  Thre are still several ways to stay involved.  Please continue to use VS2020questions@InterSystems.com to send in your questions and feedback. Tune in to the live Q&A sessions at the end of the day.  Make use of the  great on-demand learning and associated office hours happening next week.

Ask the Experts is a great way to go deeper on any subject you want.  Book a meeting with an expert or trainer for Oct 30th or Nov 2nd!

What was your favorite thing from Virtual Summit today? Let us know in the comments below.

Enjoy day 3 tommorrow!

Jeff