We’re excited to be a Silver sponsor at this week’s Salesforce Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco, where we will demonstrate how easy it is to integrate Salesforce and Force.com apps with the most “difficult to integrate” applications – those that have limited or even no APIs.

There are plenty of companies claiming agile, fast integration based on providing pre-built connectors to applications with robust APIs, such as Salesforce, Oracle and a few dozen other apps you all know. As Stefan discussed in his blog post last week (The Growing Pain of Integrating Applications) however, there are many flaws and drawbacks to this approach.

At Dreamforce, we’re demonstrating two integrations that no connector vendor can solve: integrating salesforce chatter and google+ (which has no APIs), and integrating a force.com app with Lotus Notes, which is notoriously known to be virtually impossible to integrate. In either case, Kapow Software is able to provide a real-time, bi-directional integration between these applications without the need for pre-build connectors or APIs.

As Fie pointed out in her blog post (Don’t you just hate begging for APIs), enterprise organizations are struggling to solve the application integration problem for the business partner network, web, legacy, supply chain, or social media applications.

Connector companies that state they are the #1 cloud integrator for any cloud, saas, and on-premise app is enormously exaggerated when they are limited to integrating only apps that have APIs. It reminds me of Henry Ford’s quote from 1901: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” In essence, these connector companies offer integrations, “as long as useful APIs exist”.

Why restrict your ability to integrate applications to a world limited by APIs and connectors? Live in our world. Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform lets you integrate all the apps you want without restrictions on existing connectors or APIs.

We are the first and only application integration platform to enable on-demand, self-service integration without dependencies on APIs. More and more companies are shifting to hybrid environments (on premise and cloud applications) and taking advantage of our unique approach to integration that delivers substantial ROI, very quick time to value, and rapid process automation, while also enabling the integration of applications that were previously impossible to connect due to a lack of APIs.

Declare your Independence from missing APIs

If you have a chance to come to the show, please stop by our booth. We’re giving away two dollar bills. Why? On the back of a $2 bill are our forefathers signing the Declaration of Independence. So come to our booth, see the Google+ and Lotus Notes demos, and join us to “declare your independence from missing APIs!”. We’re also offering free one year licenses to Kapow Katalyst, so what have you got to lose? Stop by the booth this week for more information.

By: Rick Kawamura

If there’s one thing to say about IT today it’s that it is incredibly fragmented. There are systems in the cloud and on-premise, and old legacy systems that you really don’t want to touch because you’ve got a nasty suspicion they might be held together by duct tape happily co-existing with state-of-the-art cloud based CRMs.

Well, “happily co-existing” in the sense they are often completely oblivious to each other. And that usually means it’s some poor guy’s job (or more often a large number of poor guys’ jobs, actually) to be moving information from one application to the other. Either that or the left hand of your company doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, which is probably even worse.

So what do you do when you’re tired wasting manpower on application integration – when you’ve got that nagging suspicion that you should be able to automate these workflows? You go to IT. But most IT departments I know are notoriously overworked; yours is probably, too. So if you’re lucky, getting on your knees and begging might eventually (as in possibly next year) get you an API to that legacy system. And let’s hope your competitors are busy tripping over their own shoe laces in the mean time.

More likely, though, IT can’t get you the APIs even if they have nothing else to do. They might not have the source code for the legacy system anymore, or the system could be someone else’s to begin with. It could be a partner system that you want to integrate with, or it could be a cloud service offering. Or it could be that new Google+ social network that everyone is talking about where the developers haven’t gotten around to making the APIs yet but you’re dying to auto-post to base on events in your internal systems.

That’s why you need the competitive advantage of being able to instantly create an API from any web-based application – an API that suits your needs and not just the portions of functionality that happen to have been made available – if any.

With Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform, you can create those APIs yourself. You define the workflow in an integrated development environment, using a patented combination of a purpose-built automation browser and a visual workflow definition by simply navigating the web interface of the application you want to integrate with. On top of this, you can add advanced data transformations as data is pulled from one system into another, with no change to existing systems required.

No less important, Katalyst Application Integration Platform fits nicely into your IT infrastructure, complete with superior monitoring capabilities and integrating seamlessly with your existing LDAP/AD user role management.

Security approved by Salesforce AppExchange.

What are you waiting for? (Oh that’s right, APIs…)

By: Anne-Sofie Nielsen

Solving the problem of application integration has always been slow, painful, and expensive.

In the original EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) days, integration meant buying (or building) application adapters (or interfaces) and then coding the connection between the adapters in an ESB/SOA framework. It was a heavy, complex project that depended on expensive software from IBM, BEA, or Tibco and required highly skilled developers. The business often waited years to receive the results it needed.

If we fast-forward to today, we live in a “connected” world and most of our business transactions and business processes are based on applications that may reside anywhere; on the web, inside our company, at our business partners or as SaaS apps in the cloud. Consequently, the business need to connect applications has grown to Herculean dimensions and traditional EAI/SOA methods are going the way of the dinosaurs.

To effectively deal with today’s exploding integration requests, we need a much more LOB-centric and far more agile method to integrate applications.

A number of “cloud integration” vendors like Cast Iron, Boomi, and SnapLogic have arisen, and even long-time larger ETL vendors like Informatica are trying to meet the LOB’s needs. They promise agility based on a concept of ready-made “API Connectors”, with the idea that if you want an integration from, say, SAP to SalesForce, you find the SAP-Salesforce API Connector, configure it, and you are done, or…are you really?

That’s the problem with this method. The promise sounds great, but the reality is far from delivering on the promise, for some obvious reasons.

I recently met with a CIO of a large Silicon Valley based company who said “We use more than 70 different apps in the cloud as well as a number of internal apps, and all I see are these ‘faces’ of the apps, without an easy way to connect them.”

Let’s say they have an additional 30 internal apps, this means about 100 apps to run their business. If you need to connect them all you will need at least n(n-1)/2=4950 API connectors. This is not taking into account that for each app, you might have dozens of different functions you want to perform, each needing a separate API connector. Well, you get the picture—solving this with pre-built API connectors is “mission impossible.”

On top of this comes the issue that many of those apps or functions don’t have API’s, which makes it really literally impossible just for that reason.

So what is the solution?

Well, what if you could get a product that allowed you to build a custom integration, with no coding, in about the same time it would take to search for an API Connector (assuming one exists)?

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Well, this is exactly what Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform is. It uniquely combines: the power of a Cloud Integration product; a visual, flowchart-based design and development environment; a high-performance application automation browser; and a collaborative management console.

Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform is the 3rd generation of Application Integration products, already proven in production at more than 500 companies all over the world.

It delivers on the promise, every time.

This is the new, better way to connect your applications and automate your business processes.

Want to discuss, drop me an email.

By: Stefan Andreasen