Kapow Katalyst Blog

Today we announced a partnership with Composite Software to simplify and accelerate the integration of critical web data in large-scale data virtualization environments.

This is exiting!

In today’s world where data is rapidly spreading into data silos inside and outside company boundaries, the days of traditional ETL data consolidation to a central database or data warehouse are starting to fail with more frequency.

This is true for many reasons.  For example, data synchronization and data timeliness issues, and all the expensive database and data warehouse licenses and storage hardware needed for the consolidation.

Today it’s critical to be able to access any data on the fly as efficiently as if the data was consolidated, but access at its source where it lives best and is accurate and fresh.

This is exactly the problem that Composite Software solves. Their smart virtualization and data access algorithms mean that you can access data as fast (or sometimes even faster) than if you consolidate the data, and at the same time get fresh, real-time data directly from the source.

But without Kapow, Composite can only access the data if you have documented SQL or API access, and as I wrote in my previous blog Why Distribution of Data is exploding and what we can do about it, more and more relevant data does not have documented programmatic access.

Now, combining the power of Kapow Web Data Server with Composite Software, you get a complete one-stop solution to access your data at its source – a solution that covers 100% of all relevant data sources for your business applications or analytics/BI solutions.

All this without expensive recoding of existing applications, expensive data warehouse solutions, nor needing documented API or feed access.

This is a valuable new partnership for Kapow and Composite, which our customers, and the market at large, will greatly benefit from!

By:  Stefan Andreasen

We all know the amount as well as the distribution of data and applications is exploding around us. This explosion occurs not only within our company, but also globally on the internet, with government agencies and with business partners.

This causes huge problems for CIOs and IT departments all over the world. They are increasingly challenged to deliver projects that drive increased IT project backlog and budget overrun:

• Automated B2B integrations
• Relevant and timely data for analytics
• Innovative new business applications
• Mobilization of existing applications

What is causing the Distribution of Data to explode?

To understand this we need to look back to the late nineties where two extremely important and closely tied technology innovations occurred:

• The Web Browser: A new one-fits-all interface to access any application, independent of underlying architecture and platform.
• The Internet: An extremely easy way to reach data and applications anywhere at any time.

Today, employees in companies all over the world perform their daily work through a web browser. Jobs in Business Development, Marketing, Sales, Business Intelligence, Market analysis, Financial management, Procurement, Research, HR or just about any other job function can be performed accessing applications and tools through a web browser.

The ease of reach to applications creates an explosion in demand for new data and new ways to work with data and applications, which in turn creates a huge pain for CIO’s and IT departments all over the world.

How to address Distribution of Data complexities?

Looking at this figure we see the explosion in distribution of data (the red area).  Up until the late 1990s, application and data integration required standard interfaces (SQL, ODBC, JDBC, APIs, etc.).  But with the explosion of content and data on the internet and the emergence of SaaS and Cloud computing, IT is faced with an exponential growth of web applications they can’t control and that don’t have standard API interfaces.

The problem is that there is no easy access to documented APIs.

Companies are spending an increasing amount of money to make those applications compatible with the known data integration world by creating APIs or data feeds.

I suggest we look at this challenge from a new perspective. If we could programmatically access the data and applications the same way a web browser does, we’d have access to everything instantly.

Today more than 400 companies globally are doing exactly this using Web Data Services from Kapow Technologies.  It’s a one-stop solution to easily access data and applications with incredible success.

Not only can they now get to all the data their LOB is demanding, but also achieve huge cost savings around:

• Decreased spending on information providers – they simply grab the data they need themselves.
• Increased automation of manual processes such as data-entry and B2B interactions.
• Elimination of the timely and often impossible negotiation and implementation of documented B2B integration protocols with suppliers and retailers.
• Lowered expenses on consultants for legacy re-write projects – instead they simply leverage the existing web interface and meet the demand for new business and mobile apps.

Try it for yourselves, it really works.

By:  Stefan Andreasen