The story
InterSystems was founded in 1978 by Phillip T. (Terry) Ragon, its current CEO. The firm was one of the vendors of M-technology (aka MUMPS) systems, with a product called ISM-11 (an DSM-11 clone) for the DEC PDP-11. Over the years, it acquired several other MUMPS implementations: DTM from Data Tree (1993); DSM from Digital (1995); and MSM from Micronetics (1998); making InterSystems the dominant M technology vendor.
The firm eventually started combining features from these products into one they called OpenM, then consolidated the technologies into a product, Caché, in 1997. Caché offered several new important features, not available in MUMPS offerings, including support for web, object-oriented development and SQL access to the database. At that time they stopped new development for all of their legacy M-based products (although the company still supports existing customers). They launched Ensemble, an integration platform, in 2003 and HealthShare, a scalable health informatics platform, in 2006. In 2007, InterSystems purchased TrakHealth, an Australian vendor of TrakCare, a modular healthcare information system based on InterSystems technology. In May 2011, the firm launched Globals as a free database based on the multi-dimensional array storage technology used in Caché. In September 2011, InterSystems purchased Siemens Health Services (SHS) France from its parent company, Siemens. In September 2017, InterSystems announced InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, which, the company said, combines database management capabilities together with interoperability and analytics, as well as technologies such as sharding for performance.
From Wikipedia’s article on InterSystems, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4