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InterSystems

InterSystems – A Software Company that Houses high-Performing DBMS and Application Development.

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In 1978, Philip Ragon founded InterSystems Corporation. It is a company established in the software sector and its headquarters is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. InterSystems is better represented as a privately held vendor which provides a range of software systems and technologies.

The main products of the company are high-performance DBMS (database management system), rapid application development, and also healthcare information systems. In 2019, the annual revenue of the company was $727 million. InterSystems have several product lines based on the services it offers. For example, the product called HealthShare is a platform for healthcare informatics systems to securely access sensitive records.

History of InterSystems Corporation

Philip Ragon, a famous American entrepreneur founded InterSystems in 1978 and currently serves as the CEO of the company. When the company was founded, it was one of the original vendors that supplied to M-Technology Systems with a product called ISM. M-Technology which is also known as MUMPS is a high-performance product for managing hospital laboratory information systems. InterSystems was a very old vendor to MUMPS and in the following years, the company started acquiring several MUMPS implementations.

The acquisitions included buying DTM from Data Tree in 1993 and DSM from DIgital in 1995. The first two acquisitions triggered the expansion of InterSystems while the third acquisition of Micronetics in 1998 made InterSystems a very powerful company for M technology. As the company acquired a series of M technology implementations, it was time for InterSystems to launch something of their own.

InterSystems
Image source: www.intersystems.com

New Products

After the acquisitions, InterSystems rolled out a product called OpenM. This product represented an integration of technologies from the series of products they acquired till 1998. The company consolidated all the technologies into a single product and named it Cache. It was released in the late 1990s. The company made a kick start will releasing all the M-based products under its brand name. But, after consolidating the technologies, the company halted any further development in the M-based product lines. They continued to support the customers but their focus shifted to a different technology.

In 2003, InterSystems released an integration platform called Ensemble which marked the companies expansion to other technology areas. Seeing the potential in the demand for high-performance and secure technologies in the healthcare sector, it developed a product called HealthShare. This product was launched in 2006 and it is a platform for scalable healthcare informatics systems which is still existing in the market. In 2007, Company acquired a vendor of TrakCare called TrakHealth. The company used the technology of InterSystems to develop a modular healthcare information system.

After making significant progress in healthcare technology, the company invested some time in developing efficient DBMS. In 2011, InterSystems launched a new product called Globals. The product was built using the same technology as Cache and it was released as a free database based on the technology of multidimensional array storage. The same year, Company made a huge acquisition from the company Siemens as it acquired its Health Services business unit. In 2017, the company rolled out another lucrative product line called InterSystems Iris Data Platform which combined the DBMS capabilities with analytics and interoperability.

Philip Ragon – Founder of InterSystems Corporation

Philip Ragon became famous after he founded InterSystems Corporation, a company that houses several high-tech solutions for multiple business sectors. Philip is also very famous as a philanthropist who along with his wife pledged to donate half of their money to doing good for those in need. He is a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows as well a member of the MIT Corporation. Last year, Philip Ragon was featured in the Forbes 400 richest people in America list in which he ranked 378.

Sybase inc

Sybase Inc – An Enterprise Software Company Acquired By SAP To Compete With Oracle.

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Sybase Inc was founded in 1984, 37 years from now. The company specialized in developing and delivering enterprise software. The company operated independently for 25 years after which it was acquired by SAP. SAP is a German multinational conglomerate based in the same sector of enterprise software. Being the largest non-American company by revenue, SAP gave a neck-to-neck competition to the other American companies. So, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems to expand its business, SAP also made a move to acquire Sybase Inc. In 2010, the deal between Sybase and SAP was closed and since then the brand name of Sybase is not used.

About Sybase Inc

Four founders, namely, Robert Epstein, Mark Hoffman, Jane Doughty, and Tom Haggin founded Sybase Inc. The company was based in Berkeley, California until the acquisition. When the company was launched officially, Sybase was mainly known for selling database management systems (DBMS) and middleware products. Sybase Inc built the first enterprise DBMS for the Linux operating system. In the early 2000s, Sybase landed many huge clients like Airtel and Telstra which are telecommunication operators.

Sybase Before Acquisition By SAP

The founders set out to found Sybase in 1984 in Berkeley, California which was the hometown of Epstein. Initially, the name of the company was System Ware and they started their initial business from Epstein’s home. The main goal behind founding the company was to build an RDBMS that will organize all the information and will be available within a computer network. In the 1990s, the Japanese division of Sybase detected some inconsistency in profit, and turned out five executives of the same division inflated the profits. So, they were fired immediately. In the same year, John S. Chen became the new Chairman, President, and CEO of the company.

In 2007, Sybase started generating revenue in billions and it planned to expand its business by partnering with bigger companies. After two years, Sybase partnered with SAP to deliver the SAP Business Suite software to the users of iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. Sybase also partnered with Verizon to manage mobility services in enterprises on a global scale. This partnership used Verizon’s Managed Mobility Solutions and the device management platform of Sybase to provide mobility services to global customers. In 2010, SAP announced the acquisition of Sybase by the company for $5.8 billion (approx). Sybase became a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAP America in July 2010.

Sybase Inc
Image source: wikimedia.org

About SAP

SAP is one of the top three publicly traded software companies in terms of revenue. Being a German multinational conglomerate, it is the largest one in the country in terms of market capitalization. The founders of the company are Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther. The company was founded back in 1972 when businesses had a huge demand for RDBMS. So, these founders who were formerly IBM employees created SAP to build real-time software for data processing. Soon, SAP will complete five decades of its business and embrace the journey and success it has achieved. Currently, there are more than 100,000 employees in SAP who are delivering quality services to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. One of the cofounders, Hasso Plattner is serving as the Chairman of the company and the recent CEO of SAP is Christian Klein.

Founders Of Sybase Inc

Robert Epstein is an engineer and entrepreneur who has co-founded several other companies than Sybase Inc. Some of the companies are New Resource Bank, Colorado Microdisplay, GetActive Software, etc. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He has also built a strong community for entrepreneurs who believe in preserving the environment while growing economically. Mark Hoffman passed out from United States Military Academy with a BS degree followed by an MBA from the University of Arizona. He served as the CEO of Sybase for 11 years followed by CommerceOne and Everdream. Currently, he is serving as the Director of Dacadoo. Jane Doughty wasn’t attached to the company for a long time. She studies chemistry and Mathematics but her career record shows that she worked as a software developer in multiple companies. She worked at IBM for more than two decades followed by other renowned companies like JPMC, AT&T, Nielsen. Tom Haggin is an angel investor who has not only co-founded Sybase but also Tilden Park Software.

sql

The Story of two Genius Scientists Behind SQL

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Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce are the original developers of the SQL Server, a product for storing and managing data. Both of them started working on it in the 1970s, and the first version of the software was released in 1974. SQL (Structured Query Language) was built as a domain-specific language to be used for accessing and manipulating data, data query and much more.

Apart from SQL, Chamberlin and Boyce are well known for their contribution in XQuery and Boyce-Codd normal form respectively.

Donald D. Chamberlin

Born in 1944 in San Jose, California, Chamberlin attended Campbell High School. He pursued electrical engineering in Harvey Mud College and later, completed his master’s as well as a PhD degree from the Stanford University. While he was in his college, he managed to land an internship in IBM Research in New York, and it is the same place where he started working after his PhD.

donald d chamberlin sql
Image Source: computerhistory.org

In the 1960s, at the time Chamberlin was in college, Computers were merely reachable by commoners. In fact, at that time, Harvey Mud College also had only a single computer, an IBM 1620. Chamberlin got lucky to have access to the computer and managed to write a program for tic-tac-toe for a human player on a keyboard.

During this time, two significant figures, Charlie Bachman and Ted Codd, were making exceptional contributions to the database management system. When Chamberlin joined IBM, one of IBM’s main concerns was to launch an efficient optimizing compiler for Codd’s Relational Model of data. Chamberlin was a part of the group working for the prototype, and hence, he was sent to CA, where he met Raymond F. Boyce.

Raymond F. Boyce

Boyce was born in 1947 and grew up in New York. He graduated from Providence College in 1968 and received his PhD from Purdue University in 1972. After receiving his doctorate, he also joined IBM and worked on database projects. Shortly, he came up with Boyce-Codd normal form in collaboration with Todd and was later sent to CA to work on the optimizing compiler.

And, when he met Chamberlin in CA, both of them set their course to develop SQL.

The Idea of SEQUEL

Raymond F Boyce Sql
Image Source: alchetron.com

SEQUEL stands for Structured English Query English which is one of IBM’s original database management systems.

While they were working on Codd’s relational ideas, they found one major drawback that made this relational model look very complicated. Since Codd was a mathematician, he explained everything with reference to the Cartesian plane and used many complex mathematical symbols and relations to elaborate his models. Since they were working to improve the data management system, both Chamberlin and Boyce thought of coming up with a language that would simplify the complexity of his models because Codd’s ideas were undoubtedly too strong. So, both of them started working on writing a language and named it SEQUEL for everyone (non-mathematicians) to use it using simple terminologies.

When they came up with SEQUEL, IBM didn’t have any product plan based on this language, so the company suggested them to produce the paper at a technical conference in Ann Arbor. Boyce went to the conference and realized that the relational database system (RDBMS) is truly the future of database management in every field. Soon after Ray returned from the conference, he died of a brain aneurysm.

Success of SEQUEL

IBM lost one of its greatest computer scientists, and Chamberlin, unfortunately, lost his partner. But, this didn’t hinder the growth and exposure of SEQUEL. Once the paper was released, IBM started working on testing the usefulness of the language in the practical world. They started building prototypes of the product (system R prototypes) based on this language. A team of 12 IBM programmers was made to work on this system R.

Products like System/38, SQL/DS and DB2 were commercially available during the late 1970s and early 1980s. After SEQUEL started launching commercial products, the shorter version of the commercial name became SQL.

During the early 1980s, the prices of computers fall unexpectedly, thus, allowing every organization to shift their paper records to a computer database. This led to the growth of database management systems, having a grip on the market and opening a vast source of profit for SQL.

Oracle also started making SQL database systems for the U.S government and sold them successfully. The language becomes so easy and efficient to command that the government launched FIPS 127, a federal database system that used SQL.

By 1986, both ANSI and ISO accepted SQL as the database language, and since then, new versions of it have been popping up into our systems.