Tune in and join Stefan as a guest on DM Radio’s broadcast, “A Tactical Approach to Enterprise Data Integration“, this Thursday, January 28, at 3PM EST.  Learn more about how Web Data Services delivers timely, trusted, web data for enterprise data integration.

On the front lines of enterprise data integration, practitioners employ a whole host of tactics in order to deliver timely, trusted, valuable data. These days, a wide range of options are available for gathering, cleansing and delivering enterprise data. From Web scraping to federated data management, ETL to ELT, open-source to the traditional heavy lifting done by major vendors – the data integration practice is more mature than ever. Tune into this episode of DM Radio to learn how the modern enterprise can mix and match tactics to suit practically any information need. We’ll talk to industry analyst Philip Russom of TDWI, plus Ilan Sehayek of Jitterbit, Peter Tran of Composite Software, and Stefan Andreasen of Kapow Technologies.

Click over to DM Radio on the Information Management site for more details.

“Information, thanks to the internet, is growing at breakneck, exponential speeds. This has proven to be both an opportunity and a curse for businesses. With all this data abundance, organizations of all sizes struggle to access and act upon it in a timely and cost effective way. Just think about the impact to your business if you could automatically add high-value Web data to your market intelligence, pricing intelligence, financial intelligence or any other business intelligence application. Until recently, this seemed like an impossible feat, or at least cost prohibitive based on the man hours involved.”

The above is an outtake of an article I recently wrote for ebizQ, the full article is available here and provides more insight into the emerging web data services market, common web data access challenges and real world use cases and benefits of web data services. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

Web Data – Why Top Business Leaders Depend On It And You Should To

Here at Kapow Technologies we just finished an outstanding quarter having signed our 400th enterprise customer, closed 87 deals, and doubled our subscription revenue mix.  We’re proud to see our hard work paying off despite tough economic times.  For more details check out our press release.

More and more businesses are seeing the critical value Kapow’s solutions and technology play in creating efficient, agile businesses.

In December I visited an executive at one of our new global enterprise customers who heads a business unit heavily dependent on business applications to perform process automation, data analysis and reporting.

To better serve the business, his company made several efforts over a 10 year period to consolidate data integration on a common platform. First Corba, then SOA. Unfortunately neither of these initiatives lived up to their promise to deliver business applications, business data and process automation at the pace needed to support line of business and growth of the company.  The economic downturn actually created an opportunity to better serve IT business needs by leveraging the Kapow Web Data Server to serve and deliver on LOB’s ever changing needs for additional data sources and more precise, timely data. They simply could not afford to wait for traditional coding approaches to “maybe” deliver on their IT needs in 6 or twelve months. They needed to get things done much more quickly and that is exactly what they are doing with Kapow.

More and more business leaders are putting front-office applications in the cloud or developing them themselves “on demand”.

Welcome to the new world of efficient business IT powered by Kapow Technologies.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Earlier this week we announced great results for Q2 FY2010.  See the highlights.  At Kapow, we see the voracious appetite of businesses to harness the power of the internet by leveraging real-time web data into their core enterprise information systems.

I met up with Joe Bugajski, analyst at The Burton Group, this morning and he conveyed that making sense out of the world of “unstructured” data remains unsolved.  Also that information managers continue to face challenges combining “external” data with the data they work with every day.

Web Data Services certainly fills that void.  With over 400 customers and Fortune 1000 companies across every industry and geography, forward thinking executives are finding ways to use public Web data to keep an eye on competition, reduce risk, automate manual processes and even roll out new products and services.   Stay tuned for our webinar with Deutsche Boerse, Europe’s #2 stock exchange, to see for yourself how real-time web data services was put into action to create a power financial instrument for energy commodities traders to time the market!

Many of you have asked for a deeper dive on the meaning of “Web Data Services”, so let me answer it here.

First, it’s important to understand the terms “Data Integration” and “Application Integration”.

Data Integration (DI) and (Enterprise) Application Integration (EAI) are not the same, though many vendors often confuse the two. Application Integration focuses on managing transactions or messages between applications while Data Integration focuses on managing the flow of data and providing standardized API’s to access the information. For more details, refer to Mark Madsen’s blog, Key Differences Between Data Integration and App Integration.

There are essentially three different types of Data Integration:

• Consolidation means moving all the data from the original data sources to a new repository, much like an ETL tool.

• Propagation means moving only the necessary data to a local storage for each application consuming the data.

• Federation means leaving the data at the original source and accessing it as needed in real-time.

Web Data Services is in reality all forms of Data Integration as well as Application Integration, with two distinct differences.  With Web Data Services:

• You primarily access data and business logic residing on the web (any application or data source you can access from a Web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari). This includes applications inside your own organization and even at your business partners.

• You do not need to recode or have programmatic access to any of the data sources. As long as you have access from a Web Browser, you can access the data with no coding and be up and running in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months.

Web Data Services is the new highly productive way to access almost any of the data you need for Business Intelligence (BI), Data Validation and Acquisition, Enterprise Mashups, Partner Integration, or basically any solution that needs agile access to data or business logic. Web Data Services gives unheard of business agility and competitive advantage compared to traditional Data Integration or Enterprise Application Integration methods.

Try it free with our Kapow Web Data Server Trial Offer

Also check the Wikipedia entry on Web Data Services to read the definition from leading industry analysts.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

“In order for us to integrate with our SAP system, we need an SAP adapter.”

“In order to migrate content to our FileNet WCMS, we need a FileNet Adapter.”

I’m sure you’ve all heard this before.

The reasoning?  Whenever you need to perform data or content migration, you need an adapter.  Or do you?

Companies like iWay Software created a nice business proving the need for adapters to business applications and data/content management systems.

But as the number of data sources and applications multiply, this strategy is proving obsolete. There are simply too many systems in the market to build individual adapters for, and the requirements for each adapter vary more and more with each use case.

Fortunately there is a faster, better solution.

Over the last 5 years any relevant business application or CMS made their system accessible through a web browser.  You can log in and search, view and even enter data through web forms.

Using a Web Data Services product like the Kapow Web Data Server, developers can now leverage this web interface to create custom adapters quickly and easily whenever they need them, and even better, exactly the way they want them. No need to buy a library of adapters, read tons of documentation and then tweak your system to work with the adapter interface.

I visit prospects and customers as often as my schedule permits, and more and more frequently I hear, “We implemented yet another integration/SOA framework only to find it obsolete before it’s even finished”. Needless to say, customers are abandoning the adapter route and whole-heartedly adopting the much more pragmatic Web Data Services solution where they can create adapters “on the fly”.

Consider this – what would be the value to your organization if you could create adapters on demand without the need to recode existing systems or work through bureaucratic procedures to gain application access?  Huge, right?

Please drop me a note and I would be more than happy to share some real-life stories from real-life global 1000 companies who have done just this, giving them unprecedented business agility.  It’s no longer a matter of when and how much, but rather taking an on demand, “just do it” approach to driving business agility.

Learn more:

• Harvest and Serve Web Data from multiple web sources with no coding
• Content Migration Demo loading data into CMS without adapters

By:  Stefan Andreasen

I am glad to see Andy Mulholland, CTO of CapGemini, got nominated again this year to IT Blog Awards 2009: CIO / IT Director for his insightful and visionary blog, one that any IT or CIO should follow very closely.

He recently wrote this entry:  Unstructured Events Call for Unstructured Data.

Behind this clever title is the acknowledgement that today’s world is changing at an ever faster pace, requiring businesses to improve their agility by working smarter and reacting much more quickly than ever before. They need to constantly have their “finger on the pulse” of market conditions, competitors, customers, suppliers, legislation, and any parameter important to running and growing their business.

To deal with this, business analysts are trying to move their day-to-day IT needs to the front-office rather than waiting for the traditionally long and expensive implementation cycles necessary for back-office applications run by the IT department. Business departments are more frequently leveraging self-service Business Intelligence dashboard tools like Corda CenterView, Palantir and ClikView, but that only helps data analysis, not agile data access. As we all now, no analysis is better than the underlying data, so having the right data, quality data, and timely data is critical for business analysts today.

As Andy writes, this is where the Kapow Web Data Server from Kapow Technologies comes in.  (Andy, glad you are “getting some great results” with Kapow Web Data Server).

Do as more than 350 companies worldwide are already doing. Leverage Web Data Services and the Kapow Web Data Server to support your rapidly increasing need for agile and timely access of the right data.

I hope Andy wins for the second year in a row, he deserves it.

By:  Stefan Andreasen