Kapow Katalyst Blog

The best thing about working in Business Development is meeting with partners and customers. It’s a great way to stay on top of technology trends, and my goal for this blog post is to keep you posted on developments I see on the road.

This year was Kapow Software’s first time exhibiting at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event where the buzz was all about the social enterprise and the value of collaboration and interaction in business and government. Kapow Software, together with our partner Threshold Consulting, made it to the final of the Salesforce Hackathon with a bi-directional integration between Salesforce Chatter and Google+ — a unique social integration feat because Google+ doesn’t support APIs.

We returned to Moscone Center in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. Arik Hesseldahl, in his AllThingsD.com blog, offers an insightful analysis of the rivalry between Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, which we witnessed firsthand. Arik also explains the two visionaries’ divergent views of the cloud, which can be summed up as a hybrid environment vs. the pure cloud.

For our part, we knew our Founder and CTO Stefan Andreasen’s session on automating content migration into Oracle OpenWorld resonated when one attendee said, “it made the conference worth it in its own right.” Oracle and Kapow Software announced a Documentum trade-in campaign with a special offer for customers who are making the move from Documentum to Oracle WebCenter, using Kapow Software’s automated migration tools.

Next on my itinerary were two events for the intelligence community. I have never seen so many different national law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local police departments, as I did at ISS World in DC. They came for training on the technologies, techniques, and legal considerations of intelligence gathering and analysis. Back in California was Suits & Spooks, the so-called anti-conference designed to bring the greatest Silicon Valley entrepreneurs together with US intelligence agencies. (There wasn’t an actual suit to be seen anywhere.)

Having been involved with the technology side of intelligence for over 10 years, I’m astounded by how far we’ve come from simple reports and dashboards. The focus now is on social network analysis, geo-location-based visualization, and enhanced reality. But for all of the advances in analytics and visualization, the greatest challenge with intelligence continues to be getting access to the data, particularly as the majority of the data – big data – is outside the control of any one organization.

Last week presented the dilemma of choosing between two events: Pyxis Mobile’s Connect 2011 Summit and GEOINT 2011 Symposium hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF). Kapow Software exhibited and presented at both, but I ended up choosing the Pyxis Mobile conference – and I’m glad I did. We met with a lot of great customers and partners, and my hat goes off to Chris Willis and Pyxis for organizing such a successful event. What was most enlightening for me is the impact that tablets (iPads and Androids) are having on enterprise strategies for mobilization. Most companies are developing strategies to mobile enable enterprise apps and were impressed with Kapow’s ability to integrate web application data without the need for APIs or any other programmable interface. Having resisted mobilization, IT seems to be forced to act finally by the ubiquitous “consumerization” of mobile devices. And tablets are starting to provide to field workers what has been promised for so long.

All in all, technological development in all of these areas is moving at neutrino speed. I’ll do my best to keep you informed. I’m back in the office this week, catching up on everything; hence, the timing of this post.

By: Rory Byrne

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

“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

Content Migration is hard work.  Dealing with thousands of HTML pages can be costly, time-consuming, and painful.  At the CM Pros and Gilbane Boston event last week, we enjoyed the focus on Content Migration.  One workshop in particular, Content Migration – the Dirty Little Secret of Content Management, provided a thorough and comprehensive investigation of  various approaches to succeed with enterprise content migration projects and to overcome the numerous hurdles and headaches associated with content migration.  For a summary of the workshop, check out Irina Guseva’s write-up at CMSWire.

One clear message from the workshop is that automation is clearly a winning strategy when it comes to complex migrations involving unstructured content and large volumes of HTML pages.

Key Benefits of Automated Content Migration:

1.    Save Time – Cut time to market up to 90% through automated data access, extraction, cleansing, transformation and QA.  Eliminate content freezes.  Accelerate your time to market for your production CMS.
2.    Save Money – Reduce manual, error-prone processes and cut resource requirements saving up to 80%.
3.    Accuracy -  Look for error detection and the ability to integrate complex JavaScript and AJAX content, as well as on-the-fly exception handling through real-time error identification.
4.    Project Completeness – Finish projects ahead of schedule, within budget, and no disruption to operations.

The alternative?  Manual cut-and-paste and black-box approaches which are complex, error-prone, expensive, and often times unable to complete the job.

There are a few vendors making bold promises around content migration.  We’ve stepped in and had to finish several of their projects because their tools and processes couldn’t get the whole project done and the client was losing their patience with the multiple delays and increasing costs.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing a Content Migration vendor and solution:

1.   Automation is King – Intel was able to reduce the number of developers on a large content migration project from 45 down to 2.  Check out how Intel reduced costs 80% and got their content migration with Kapow Technologies done in 1/10th the time.
2.    Don’t waste your time custom programming to a CMS’s APIs. Especially in cases where APIs don’t exits, visual UIs like Kapow’s provide full access to all functionality for proper loading of your content.
3.    Place your trust in “No Coding” through a robust Visual IDE which will save you peace of mind, frustration, headaches, and maybe even your job (just kidding).  Which is to say, avoid coding with JYTHON for transforming your data.
4.    Insist on Real-time Error Checking – don’t get caught in the ongoing process of checking your logs or QA’ing your site, only to find out it’s broken and then having to re-write your script and start again.

Kapow Technologies offers the industry’s ONLY solution to completely automate content migration.  Learn more on our website.  Here are three great resources to get you started:

1.    Whitepaper:  The Definitive Guide to Automating Content Migration
2.    Webinar:  A new approach to Content Migration – A use case featuring Intel
3.    Demo:  Extract data and load into CMS without APIs or coding

Our “No Coding” tagline has resonated with many of you.  Thank you for the support and positive comments in the media and your blogs.  Disruptive technologies often have the opposite effect e.g. making people uncomfortable.  The Kapow Web Data Server is truly a paradigm shift – radically changing how traditionally complex migration of data between source and destination systems or turning applications into web services is done.

Many customers have described to me the “aha” moment they’ve had.  Across the board, our customers kept saying to us, “the amazing thing about the Web Data Server is that it requires no coding”.  It’s great when your customers do your marketing for you!

Two revolutionary inventions with the Kapow Web Data Server are key to our ability to eliminate traditional coding associated with Business Intelligence, Data Integration, and application integration projects:

1.    Existing applications can be easily accessed as-is through their HTML/AJAX front-end through our point-and-click visual development tool, eliminating the need to deal with proprietary APIs.  Even better, it’s done in the context of the content owner or business user (through what they see in their web browser), eliminating any misunderstandings that occur when explaining to coders what needs to be done i.e. translating business/ functional requirements to technical specs.

2.    Instant, visual feedback allows results to be seen on the spot – delivering high productivity and time to market improvements.

We have several videos on our website demonstrating how users easily access, enrich, and serve web data with “no coding”:

•    Harvest the web for pricing and market intelligence

•    Access and serve web data from Linkedin, Jigsaw and more with no coding

In fact, the tool is intuitive and easy enough that even our marketers have been known to build their own Kapow robots to harvest web data.

But programmers love our product even more.  Why?  It makes them more productive.  With a visual interface, real-time feedback, and 100% accuracy, programmers get more done in a lot less time.

All Content Migration, data warehouse ETL, data integration and application development projects require an iterative process, from first attempt until solved.

With traditional methods, each iteration can take weeks and even months to get it right.  This is cumbersome and frustrating for most.

The Kapow Web Data Server cuts down each iteration to 3 simple steps (measured in minutes):

1.    Visually instruct what you want (without coding), just like working with the data in a web browser (point and click).

2.    See the end result in real-time, right in the middle of instructing how and what to do.  (Since this happens real-time, step 1 and 2 are basically the same… but would you  believe me if I called it a 2 step process?)

3.    Modify instructions based on the instant, visual feedback, i.e. go back to step 1.

This extremely quick turn-around per iteration with the Kapow Web Data Server allows you to get to 100% of what you want.  100% accuracy in 1/10th the time.  And did I mention “no coding”?

Don’t just take my word for it, please check out what Intel and Audi had to say about Kapow.

Technology continues to evolve.  The market demands it.  Register for our free trial.  It really works.

By:  Stefan Andreasen