More than 100 of QuadraMed's hospital clients run Cache as part of the QuadraMed platform. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Defense's health affairs group, and all of the hospitals ranked in the top 10 in the U.S. by U.S. News and World Report also use Cache, according to InterSystems.

Steve Garone, an analyst affiliated with Rye Brook, N.Y.-based Ideas International Inc., said InterSystem's disproportionate success in health care stems from the industry's demand for "the ability to store and efficiently access large amounts of varied information and data types quickly, tasks for which Cache is designed to support." Garone added that "given the growth in information and compliance requirements in [health care and financial services], this is not a bad position for Intersystems to be in."

But InterSystems is hoping to also woo more people like Don Oldham, CEO of Digital Technology International Inc. (DTI), a US$35 million-a-year developer of software for the newspaper industry. Zen "is the simplest AJAX we've ever seen," he said. "We're fond of Adobe, and so we looked long and hard at Flex. But it's still a traditional middleware approach, which we think is cumbersome and slow to develop in."

DTI is switching all 260 of its newspaper clients over from Sybase Inc.'s Adaptive Server Enterprise to Cache, which Oldham said should boost runtime performance about tenfold.

Another new tool, Jalapeno, lets Java developers quickly create objects that persist in the database by eliminating the usual object-relational mapping layer, Grabscheid said. He said Jalapeno "relieves the developer of the worry of how the data is going to be stored. Developers should therefore enjoy a higher level of efficiency because they can use tools with which they are familiar."