Kapow Katalyst Blog

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at Corda’s Visual Evolution User Conference. Corda’s CenterView product delivers a powerful Business Intelligence dashboard solution to improve performance management, while even allowing dashboard access from mobile devices such as your iPhone.

Corda CEO Neal Williams presented a 9 step KPI (Key Performance Indicator) process to identify driver and outcome metrics that matter most for creating successful Business Intelligence processes.  Interestingly, Neal explained that the selection of data sources is often the most flawed part of the process because most business analysts take a bottoms-up approach by choosing easy-to-get-to data sources which lead to suboptimal business decisions. Neal stressed the importance of taking a top-down approach, including a very careful analysis and selection process to determine which data sources create the most accurate and timely results.

It became very clear that our product can go a long way in ensuring business analysts get the best, freshest and most valuable data for their BI dashboard.  During my presentation, one person commented, “I asked my IT department for some critical data, data that I can easily access in my web browser, but the response was it could take 6-12 months to get the data”. With Kapow Web Data Server it would have taken at most, a few hours.

As an example, I encourage you to read the article, “Hyper Management of working capital:  Technology suport the work of corporate treasury“, which describes how FiServ uses Kapow robots to access complex, hard-to-get-to data sources residing at more than 300 banks spread over 10 countries. FiServ struggled with this problem for years with no other alternative than error-prone, manual cut-and-paste. Now successfully in production as a joint solution of Corda and Kapow Technologies, Fiserv is a great example how Kapow Web Data Server can help business analysts settle for nothing less than the best, most timely data sources.

Enjoy reading.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Listen to Stefan on IBM Rational’s Software Channel as he discusses agile business application development using Kapow and EGL.  Stefan focuses on how Kapow and IBM help developers with a more dynamic, iterative development process to better meet the needs of Line of Business owners.

Is Data Integration really “un-sexy”?

Peter Giblett recently wrote a great post, 7 Key Challenges for Data Integration, in his CIO Community blog that started off saying that Data Integration is often seen as the “un-sexy” part of IT.  But in many respects, I think that view is changing.

The reason IT thinks Data Integration is un-sexy is because it’s de-motivating and usually a waste of time to try solve a problem that is of little importance or is not yet really a problem.

Solving data integration for data sources without knowing when and if they are needed, or even if it will ever be critical to the company, is definitely not very appealing.

The future of data integration has to be much more agile, allowing IT to quickly deliver the right data at the right time to make timely critical business decisions.

This process of creating urgency and relevance for data access and delivery transforms data integration from being un-sexy to, for a lack of a better word, sexy.

It’s a lot more fun to solve data integration problems when the immediate benefits are known than to try to guess the needs of the future.

The definition of “sexy” is a relative term.  What is sexy to one person may not be the same for another.  With Web Data Services, coders and developers will be able to satisfy the time-critical data needs of their business users, and thus have not only a sexy job, but also make Data Integration a sexy part of IT.

So what tools can help IT think Data Integration is sexy?  What tools can deliver agile data access of timely, relevant data that helps the business immediately make better business decisions?

I definitely think Web Data Services is one of those tools.

What do you think?

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Consider this scenario:  A large tanker carrying hazardous material suffers propulsion system failure in the Gulf of Mexico.  How does one actively manage this emergency in real-time and what is the correct course of action to get the vessel safely to the nearest port, avoid further disasters, and alert nearby ships, oil platforms, and environmental agencies?  The smart guys over at IBM created a very compelling Maritime Domain Situational Awareness Mashup using three key principles:

•    Discovery, normalization, and fusion of multiple disparate data sources
•    Display multiple layers of related data in a geospatial map aiding situational awareness and analysis
•    Applies business rules to detect situations; automate task procedures, and guide user interaction where dictated by procedure, best practices, or workflow

IBM defines Situational Awareness as “the understanding of data and events within a given space and time and understanding the meaning in the present and near future [and] deal with multiple sources of data… often rendered in a… map”.  Needless to say, pulling real-time web data from multiple sources to make time-critical decisions can be applied not only to emergency situations, but also to anti-terrorism, financial forecasting, price monitoring, competitive intelligence and fraud detection, just to name a few.

What is interesting here is the critical dependency on Web Data to deliver the full value of a Mashup. All the data used in the Maritime example (vessel information, weather, tide schedules, port locations, and nearby ship routes) is only available through public websites (most of which have no APIs).

The real-time access and REST service-enablement to this critical, situational data  was accomplished with Kapow OnDemand.

This is just another example of how Web Data Services can be used to power mission critical Situational Awareness by leveraging the gold-mine of data sources available on the Web (including public web, as well as federal, government and partner web sites).

We’re proud to the have creators of this mashup joining us in our booth at the IBM Information on Demand Conference to show this compelling demonstration.  If you are at the show, come by and check it out.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Please tune in to hear Stefan and Jim Kobielus on Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct Podcast, ”Web data services extend data access and distribution beyond the RDB-BI straitjacket”.  Dana moderates an intriguing discussion on making the most of Web Data Services for Business Intelligence, focusing on web data volume, relevancy and timeliness, as well as access, monetization, enablement, governance, security, and the unification and converging of structured and unstructured data.  And in looking towards the future, Jim and Stefan weigh in on the impact of cloud computing on Web Data Service tools.

Jim is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, and an expert on data warehousing, advanced analytics, and business intelligence.

Enjoy the Podcast!

At Kapow Technologies we launched our first SaaS product Kapow OnDemand about a year ago and today we have many great companies running it for pricing intelligence, web portals, mobile enablement and more. During the same period we also had an increasing amount of people using either our non-commercial community, openkapow, or a free trial of Kapow OnDemand. Many came back and said “I love this product, it’s exactly what I’m looking for, but my project and budget is not big enough for my own hosted solution like Kapow OnDemand.  Do you have a multi-tenant pay-as-you-go SaaS offering instead?”

As always, we strive to deliver products our customers want, so we looked around for the ideal partner to launch such a product.

Today I am very proud to announce we are launching Kapow Web Data Services 7.0.0, a new pay-as-you-go SaaS service together with StrikeIron.  The new offering is based on a true SaaS multi-tenant implementation of our well proven and robust Kapow OnDemand hosted solution.

Say “goodbye” to cutting and pasting from your web browser into Microsoft Excel. Now you can wrap any website or web application into RSS feeds or REST web services for rapid, automated and structured access of any external web data source. Deliver that feed or service to your choice of application, Business Intelligence tool or RSS feed reader. With the StrikeIron Live Data for Excel you can even get real-time access to Web Data from Microsoft Excel.

Bob Brauer, Founder and President of StrikeIron, wrote a nice blog post on the announcement.
We are excited about our partnership with Bob’s company, and StrikeIron has some great complementary data services.  And now together with Kapow Technologies they have the most complete SaaS based Data Services offering on the market.

Check out our free trial of Kapow Web Data Services 7.0.0 over on StrikeIron and let us know what you think.

By:  Stefan Andreasen