IFS demonstrates in-memory capabilities for IFS Applications 9

IFS announces plans to deliver an in-memory optimised update to IFS Applications 9 in 2015

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces its plans for in-memory capabilities at IFS World Conference in Boston. Real-world scenarios using real-time data analysis in IFS Applications™ were run thousands of times faster through the use of in-memory database technology.

IFS’s in-memory database technology brings companies closer to their businesses by allowing speedy analysis and reporting of transactional data rather than of data stored in warehouses, which is only updated periodically. It also supports IFS’s strategy to use visualisation and analysis built into processes and tasks in the application to improve transparency and decision making on every level of the organisation.

As part of the in-memory offering, IFS also revealed IFS In-Memory Advisor™- a new tool designed to help customers apply in-memory technology to the areas of IFS Applications where it will yield maximum effect. The in-memory offering will be included in an update to IFS Applications 9 planned to ship in the fourth quarter of 2015.

By applying the in-memory capabilities, many analytical queries go from taking minutes to fractions of a second.

“The benefits of in-memory kick in when you have about a million records in a table, with the greatest effect seen when you are processing hundreds of millions of records,” IFS CTO Dan Matthews said. “The speed of narrow analytical queries can be increased by hundreds or thousands of times, whereas broader queries might increase by a factor of up to ten, and some are not affected at all. Using real customer data, we see compression ratios ranging from 3:1 to 10:1, so you need much less memory than the data occupies on disk.”

The memory need is further reduced by IFS’s evolutionary approach to in-memory databases. Rather than constantly storing the entire database in-memory, which is not necessary or especially beneficial, IFS has developed IFS In-Memory Advisor. Designed and delivered as part of the IFS in-memory offering, IFS In-Memory Advisor helps customers apply in-memory technology only to those parts of IFS Applications that it will offer the most significant benefits. This ensures the optimal balance of using in-memory where beneficial while leaving the rest of the data on a less expensive disk.

“IFS has always believed in evolution rather than revolution. We believe in offering in-memory capabilities to our customers on their own terms. We are not forcing them to throw out their existing databases and skills, go through a major upgrade, or repurchase their IFS Applications user licenses,” Dan Matthews continued.