Press Releases
Australian Software Developers and Students Clean Up
At InterSystems Global Innovator Awards
Queensland-based Optimate Wins First Prize For Mining Safety Application, Sydney-based Anudita Kuksal Wins First Prize in Student Innovator Awards.
SYDNEY, Aust., April 23, 2007 —Australian software developers and students dominated the InterSystems Innovator Awards -- winning two of the three categories and earning a place in the third -- at the software vendor's annual worldwide development conference, DEVCON 2007, held in Orlando Florida in the United States.
The InterSystems Innovator Awards honour the creativity and technical prowess of IT professionals who use InterSystems' innovative database and integration software. The InterSystems product line includes the CACHÉ high performance object database, Ensemble rapid integration software, and the HealthShare health information exchange platform.
Queensland-based software developer Optimate won first prize in the CACHÉ Innovator Award category -- including $US5,000 in cash -- for its Faceguard Longwall Monitoring System. Faceguard was developed to provide real time analysis of roof strata conditions in longwall coal mines and to identify behaviours that may indicate an imminent weakness in the roof. This knowledge can be used to change the operating mode or schedule to avoid a roof collapse and its associated risks to operators and production.
Anudita Kuksal from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) won first prize in the Student Innovator Award category - also including $US5,000 in cash. The concept for Anudita's CACHÉ-based application, Teacher's Pet, first formed when she was working as a tutor for a newly opened tutoring business and noticed the inefficiencies and confusion that arose from manual record-keeping. Teacher's Pet was developed as a Web-based database management system in CACHÉ to provide administrative control over the tutoring business. Anudita -- who recently graduated from UTS and now works at Westpac, an InterSystems corporate customer -- was in Florida to accept the award.
Another Australian software developer, Medical Systems Design, won third prize in the Ensemble Innovator Award category -- including $US1,000 in cash -- for its SurgiDat patient-centric inventory management system. MSDesign's system provides automated workflow for "Point of Use Inventory" in healthcare, allowing healthcare providers to increase revenues and improve stock management through automated billing and just in time reordering. Because SurgiDat is based on Ensemble integration software, the system readily integrates with a hospital's existing systems and technology landscape, managing all inventory items such as consumables, prostheses, surgical instruments and drugs to a patient level.
InterSystems partnered with leading industry analysts to judge the InterSystems Innovator Awards 2007. Carl Olofson of IDC judged the CACHÉ-based applications, while Jess Thompson from Gartner, Inc., judged the Ensemble-based submissions.
Anudita Kuksal's teacher at UTS, Zenon Chaczko, Senior Lecturer and Supervisor of the Software Engineering Program at the Faculty of Engineering, congratulated her on the award. "Anudita's award is a spin-off from the relationship UTS has enjoyed with InterSystems since 2002 as a member of its Campus Program. It's a great example of what can happen when you combine raw talent and educational excellence with an industry-based project and innovative development software."
"Our Australian winners competed against over 20 entrants in each category from all around the world," said Denis Tebbutt, Managing Director for InterSystems in Australia. "That they won two of the three categories and picked up one third of the awards on offer is a testament to the depth of talent and innovation among Australian software developers and students."
The InterSystems Innovator Awards is an annual contest. Any application developer with at least one site using an application based on either InterSystems CACHÉ or Ensemble may enter the 2008 awards.
About InterSystems
InterSystems Corporation is a privately-held US$200,000,000 company with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. and offices in 22 countries. InterSystems CACHÉ® is a high performance object database that makes applications faster and more scalable. InterSystems Ensemble® is a rapid integration platform that enriches applications with new functionality, and makes them connectable. InterSystems HealthShare™ is a platform that leverages existing healthcare applications to rapidly create regional or national electronic health records.
InterSystems is the predominant vendor of database and integration software for healthcare applications. CACHÉ and Ensemble are used as the core technology for clinical applications in thousands of hospitals around the world, including all U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and U.S. Department of Defense hospitals, and the Kaiser Permanente network. Leading software vendors who build clinical application products with InterSystems' technologies include Epic Systems, GE Healthcare, Misys Healthcare, QuadraMed, and many more. For more information, visit InterSystems.com.
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Editorial Contact
David Sanday
Bowes Communications
02 9387 2333
david.sanday@bowespr.com
