Kapow Katalyst Blog

Boris Evelson wrote and interesting  blog, “How Do We Define a BI Vendor”, on the Information Management site. It’s a great summary of the features that characterize a BI vendor (or product), but IMHO it’s missing the most vital characteristic of the all, data access to the right data.

BI analytics is useless without the right data.  No advanced BI feature can compensate for not having access to the most relevant and timely data.

Unfortunately for business analysts, a growing volume of relevant BI data is locked in Web sites beyond the reach of any standard data access method available in BI products on the market today.

Fortunately there is a solution; it’s called Web Data Services, a convenient, economical way to access data through an existing Web presentation layer (the same interface used by normal Web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Web Data Services can both consolidate Web data into a standard database or wrap it into standard Web services, both of which can then be easily consumed by any BI product on the market.

Suddenly business analysts can access all the data they know from their application interfaces directly in the BI tools.

Jim Ericson recently wrote a nice article ( Net Expectations -What a Web data service economy implies for business ) about the value of Web Data Services in which he digs in to all the aspects of using the Web as a new way to get data that’s faster and more cost-effective.

The article includes this quote by longtime BI analyst Howard Dresner:

“The nice thing about Web data services… is that it’s easy, it’s relatively inexpensive to create or consume and it’s immediate. Business doesn’t want to wait until next quarter, and IT is gravitating this way too because they have only so much budget and so many people.”

What a powerful statement. With Web Data Services, it suddenly becomes easy, inexpensive and immediate to obtain data access, something I am sure many IT departments will praise while they struggle to deliver the necessary data in-time and within-budget to their increasingly data-hungry Lines of Business.

What is unique about the Kapow Web Data Server is that it can get you the data even when no APIs exist by leveraging the Web presentation layer interface that always exists on the Web.

Even if there is an API, the no coding robotic approach by Kapow Technologies is typically a lot faster and  an easier way to access the data.

Think about it. If I am a business analyst and need Salesforce.com data in my BI dashboard, I really don’t want to learn about Salesforce APIs and program lines of code. I’d much rather just point at the data with my mouse in the Kapow RoboMaker Visual IDE, and get data access directly the way I am used to. Here at Kapow Technologies we have dozens of these “robots” integrating SalesForce with Marketo (our marketing automation tool), our Emails in Microsoft Exchange, Jigsaw, our customer bug tracking system, our ERP systems, and so on… and we would never dream about using the APIs.

To make my final point, go back to Jim Ericson’s article to learn more about how Fiserv uses the Kapow Web Data Server to integrate with 300 banks in 10 countries, all with no coding. It’s an impressive real-life story about the value of Web Data Services.

As always, please send me your comments, my email is SA at kapowtech dot com

By:  Stefan Andreasen

In any kind of data access scenario, transforming and applying business logic to your extracted data is critical to structure the data to the exact format you need.

In ETL terminology this is the “T” in ETL.

When accessing data from Web based applications, this capability is critical since the data is typically unstructured and the more structure you can add, the higher the value.

Most Web Scraping and Screen Scraping tools on the market today typically lack adequate transformation capabilities.

Here are some examples as to how the Kapow Web  Data Server delivers full transformation:

Below is a small extract of a blog list from PW Forum:

On the first line in blue you see the timestamp set to “Today 15:15:13”. This timestamp denotes the time and date when this blog entry was posted, but it would need to be transformed into a fixed timestamp like “2010-02-14 3:15:13 pm Pacific time” to be useful in comparing it to other blog entries over the internet.

Here’s another example from Ebay. When you bid on an item on Ebay, the price of the item is red or green depending on whether you are the high bidder or not. This is important information “hidden” in the color that you would like to capture along with the price.  Once transformed, you’ll know not only the price, but whether it is the “highest bid” or not.  It’s a simple step to define the business logic as “if price is ‘green’ then set status to ‘high bidder’ otherwise set status to ‘not high bidder’.”

The Kapow Web Data server and its powerful visual programming IDE allows you to  apply any business logic and data transformation you can think of giving you the most powerful ETL for the Web product on the market today. And it’s all done visually with no need for any coding.

Try it out next time you need Web data for your BI or analytics tools.

By:  Stefan Andreasen