As I recently explained, treating data as a business discipline—rather than a technical one—is a critical component of delivering competitive advantage through investment in data processing, analytics and artificial intelligence. As enterprises embrace data as a business discipline, it is increasingly important that the products used for data processing and management enable collaboration between different business domains as well as users in various roles, including technology administration, data engineering and data analysis. Employees in each of these roles have different requirements and have historically used multiple products that need to be stitched together, leading to the potential for friction and fragmentation. This is the challenge that InterSystems is addressing with its newly rebranded InterSystems Data Studio product.
InterSystems was founded in 1978 and provides data platform and data management software for multiple industries, including healthcare, banking, financial services and manufacturing and logistics. The company is perhaps best known for its IRIS data platform, which supports multi-model data processing and provides functionality for data integration, application development and deployment, machine learning, analytics and artificial intelligence, including generative AI.
InterSystems is a flexible platform that enables data to be stored once and then accessed as tables, objects, documents, key-value, vectors or multidimensional arrays and queried using SQL, ML and GenAI. This multi-model database functionality is integral in enabling IRIS to support use cases that require hybrid data processing to deliver intelligent operational applications. The company was rated as Exemplary in ISG’s 2025 Buyers Guides for Analytic Data Platforms, Operational Data Platforms and Overall Data Platforms, addressing a combination of both operational and analytic workloads.
IRIS also serves as the underlying data platform for InterSystems’ other products. The enterprise is particularly well-known in the healthcare sector, where it also offers the HealthShare interoperability platform and TrakCare healthcare information system. Both of these products are underpinned by IRIS, as are InterSystems FHIR Cloud Services, InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator and InterSystems Data Studio. The company was also selected by ISG Software Research analysts as the Overall Software Innovation winner in the 2025 ISG Software Innovation Awards for North America.
InterSystems Data Studio is a managed offering designed to provide centralized access to data from multiple sources, as well as the ability to secure, integrate, curate and govern the data and create business intelligence reports and dashboards. Initially branded Data Fabric Studio, the product takes advantage of IRIS’ smart data fabric architecture to facilitate the management and processing of data from multiple data sources via a consistent metadata and semantic layer, as well as embedded data exploration, BI, ML and GenAI capabilities.
I assert that through 2027, three-quarters of enterprises will adopt data fabric technologies to facilitate the management and processing of data across multiple data platforms and
cloud environments. Data fabric is a technology-driven approach to managing and governing data across distributed environments. As such, it can be viewed as a significant undertaking. While InterSystems Data Studio can be used to facilitate an enterprise-wide fabric architecture, the product renaming is designed to reflect that, as a low-code environment, it can be used to quickly connect data across silos without the need to rearchitect data architecture completely.
The product enables users to connect to data sources, define data schemas and structures and create and schedule data pipelines to extract data from external data sources to populate and update tables within Data Studio. InterSystems Data Studio also enables the creation of BI cubes based on the tables. These can be used to create reports and dashboards that can be accessed by InterSystems’ IRIS Adaptive Analytics BI tool, which is included with the product, as well as external analytics tools via JDBC, ODBC and REST interfaces.
In addition, InterSystems Data Studio enables the creation and scheduling of snapshots of data to facilitate analysis of data as it evolves. The breadth of functionality offered by InterSystems Data Studio is targeted at three different sets of users: administrators, data analysts and data engineers or data stewards. For administrators, the product provides an environment for configuring security and access credentialing for associated users and data sources. Data analysts, as well as data engineers, are also able to define and build cubes to create BI dashboards. Data engineers and data stewards have functionality for importing data and schemas into the product’s data catalog by defining and scheduling integration, transformation and validation pipelines as well as defining and scheduling snapshots and tasks. InterSystems also offers versions of Data Studio prepopulated with data models specifically to address asset management and supply chain requirements.
Data silos are a perennial problem for enterprises, highlighted by the requirements to combine data from multiple applications to support intelligent operational applications
driven by AI. Two-fifths (40%) of participants in ISG’s Data and AI Program Study cited data silos and fragmentation as a primary data challenge impacting the organization, and a similar proportion (38%) agreed that the cost of harmonizing data outweighs the likely benefits. Traditional approaches are not helped by the need to combine multiple tools for different aspects of data integration, management and analysis.
I recommend that enterprises looking for alternative approaches to data unification include InterSystems Data Studio in the evaluations. The company is best known as a data platform provider, but has a long track record of enabling data integration and management in some of the most complex use cases. Raising the profile of Data Studio and boosting its ability to address data governance and data quality tasks would serve the company well.
Regards,
Matt Aslett
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