Mobilizing existing business apps is critical for many companies, but is often mission impossible!

I don’t have to put too much effort in discussing why going mobile, can be the difference between do or die.

We all know that if we cannot serve our customers in their world, then we will lose them as customers. This is exactly why the growing customer demand for mobile access is critical and urgent for any company with internet based B2C revenue.

Since we are already serving these customers, it sounds simple, we “just” need to make a nice iPhone or Android app interface for our existing B2C applications and the problem is solved.

Much easier said than done!

Over the last year Kapow Software has engaged in partnerships with multiple MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform) vendors, for example Antenna, because their customers often cannot supply them with the basic foundation for the mobile application – they simply don’t have the necessary Web services or APIs to support a mobile app. Without that no MEAP vendor can create the mobile apps.

I heard a horrifying story about how large a US based B2C company with major revenue streams coming from their B2C e-commerce web-site simply had to abandon critical mobilization projects, and as a consequence face revenue drops and a fading customer base.

To solve this problem once and for all, Kapow Software this week announced Kapow Mobile Katalyst.

Over the last year Kapow Katalyst has already helped MEAP vendors and IT departments in large enterprises deliver state of the art mobile apps for otherwise “mission-impossible” mobilization projects, including mobile web-banking, mobile e-commerce, mobile airline mileage program, mobile car navigation and mobile student apps, for both US and international customers. None of these projects took more than 4 months from start to end.

Kapow Mobile Katalyst allows our customers and MEAP partners to self-service API-enable their existing B2C or B2E applications at breathtaking speed, all with no coding. For example, as shown in the image above, Commerz bank, one of the largest banks in Germany, used Kapow Mobile Katalyst to REST service enable every function on their existing web banking website in a matter of weeks. Functions including Login, List Accounts, List Transactions, Transfer Money, List Portfolio, Buy/Sell Stocks, etc. The bleak alternative would have been a major rewrite of a very complex web-banking application, which not only could take years, but also would require immense testing and security screening.

I encourage you to read some of the great press coverage we got this week.

Kapow Software Launches Kapow Mobile Katalyst™ for Mobilizing Business Applications 10x Faster

Kapow’s Mobile Katalyst Creates Successful Mobile Experiences Without APIs

Kapow Mobile Katalyst debuts as new means to rapidly convert web applications to mobile apps sans APIs

By: Stefan Andreasen

I recently visited one of our customers who uses Kapow Katalyst to automatically extract and normalize job postings from the career/hiring section of client’s corporate web sites.  We actually have several customers using Kapow Katalyst for this type of solution, but this was the first time I heard the phrase “job wrapping”.

To me, job wrapping is a subset of the more general term “web wrapping”, which is a method of wrapping an existing web application, such as a SaaS application integration,  so you can control it automatically in a business process such as extracting or entering data, or perform a transaction such as provisioning a new user in the application.

In Kapow Katalyst you do this by building a “script” or “robot”  that mimics a human navigating through a traditional web browser. You build the robot by typing in a URL, entering login information and navigating the web app to extract data, perform a transaction or apply a business rule or data transformation. Basically the web application is turned into an API or a structured data feed without performing any changes to the source application and thus eliminating the need for IT involvement.

In the job wrapping example this means you could automatically synchronize data on an external corporate jobs section to increase the likelihood someone will find and apply for the job – all without involving traditional IT methodology.

Kapow Katalyst can live either in the cloud or on-premise, so you can even use it to wrap your internal business application as long as it has a web front-end.

Web wrapping is conceptually a very fast way to connect SaaS and other web apps which is actually one of the fastest growing areas for our technology today. I’ll write more about that in a separate blog so stay tuned.

Needless to say, Kapow Katalyst is the leading Web Wrapping platform on the market.

Go wrap!

By: Stefan Andreasen