We’re so excited to announce the KapowNow webinar series. This is not just another set of webinars. We’ve specifically designed them so everyone can fit them into their busy schedules. They are short! In less than 30 minutes, you can learn about application integration, process automation, rapid creation of business applications, Big Data, social media monitoring, mobile enablement and much more.

Watch live demos and get all the tips and tricks you need to make integration more stress free, your business users more empowered, your company more agile and innovative. This series will show you how to use Kapow Katalyst and Kapow Kapplets as the single application integration platform, solving disconnects across the organizations such as getting analysts their data, providing employees mobile access to legacy applications and eliminating manual process – just to name a few examples.

Register today and spread the word by tweeting and using the hashtag #kapownow.

By: Hila Segal, Director, Product Marketing

Traditionally, when we talk about how data relates to applications, we think of data as the bottom of the three layers of the application stack:

But that distinction is evaporating fast, and soon we will end up with only one layer: the application itself.

Modern application frameworks also define the data model and tie it tightly with the application logic and the user interface. This means that even if you could access the data directly in the SQL database, the data won’t make much sense without the application logic that ties it together.

Similary application frameworks are also used to build the user interface, which means that application logic in modern applications is also woven into the the user interface; for example, into the JavaScript of a web application, leveraging one of many AJAJX frameworks to create a vivid user experience.

Now let’s look at BIG DATA applications. These don’t even use standard SQL databases anymore, but specialized NoSQL databases like HBase and Hive, build on the Hadoop processing framework. Now capabilities like search and analytics are tied together in one platform and the data can only be accessed through the BIG DATA application itself. If you need to fresh up on NoSQL technologies, check out this good (albeit a bit old) article, Decline of the Enterprise Data Warehouse by Road to Failure blogger Bradford.

The consequence of all this is that data and applications are becoming one and the same thing.

Similarly, data integration and application integration products are becoming one and the same thing, and anyone who needs to access data, will think of data in an application, not data standing alone.

To deal with this, we need to develop innovative new integration technologies that can access data through the application — a hybrid data integration and application integration platform, so to speak, but much more agile, since the pace of business and the impatience of business users today don’t permit waiting months or years to leverage that data.

The Kapow Innovation is the scalable Kapow Katalyst Enterprise Application Integration Platform that can live both on-premise or in the cloud; a technology that can access the data for the modern world, a world where there are no longer defined application layers.

Do you agree or disagree?

By: Stefan Andreasen

In 2007, James Governor penned an article, Why Applications Are Like Fish and Data Is Like Wine, depicting how data gets better with age, while apps, like fish, begin to smell over time.

Earlier this year, Chuck Hollis from EMC offered his own wrinkle on the topic, also making a case for keeping the data (wine) and dumping those ‘lumbering apps’ (stale fish).

Both offer interesting reads, but too quickly dismiss the value of apps. Fish and wine go well together and depending on how you pair them, can make or break the experience or value of the meal. The same is true in the modern enterprise – the fish (application) is equally, if not more important than the wine (data), especially when the apps are kept “fresh and simple” with “many varieties to choose from…”

Consider if all the data trapped within applications were easily accessed and made even easier to interact with other applications.

There should be a straightforward way to interact and automate as many ‘fresh’ application sources as possible, in the shortest amount of time. IT organizations can no longer remain ‘comfortably numb’ in their avoidance of these agile Line Of Business (LOB) activities.

So, does the LOB really want a customary IT application integration fix or are they asking for something different? When the LOB says, “I really need access to this data now!” what they are really asking for is to interact with applications (or websites) in an impromptu manner in order to keep pace with emerging business dynamics and acquire key data advantages for the business.

The blistering pace and expansion of social media access, in all its forms (brand management, blog monitoring, anti-piracy, competitive intelligence, analyst research, prospect & customer mapping, consumer behavior analysis, marketing research, partner & reseller communication, on-line videos, risk compliance, legal monitoring, corporate reputation, background checks, R&D innovation research, consumer & customer research, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, social CRM) makes the LOB integration demand on IT seem like an insurmountable task. The intensification of interactions from sources without API coverage (or even marginal API compliance) can no longer shackle the LOB data integration needs.

The traditional corporate IT blueprint has been to deploy long established application integration methodologies. This old design is already showing the strain of abandonment. I would propose a modern application integration approach consisting of the following components:

APPLICATION INTEGRATION PILLARS:

All four pillars are key to providing real-time integration, but they must also move toward a new form of LOB automation – a self-service component for the LOB. Ubiquitous access with the ability to quickly prototype and test application interactions are the most critical components to this offering. Applications need to be integrated in order for the LOB to interact and drive time-to-value (TTV) in the enterprise.

Adding to the turmoil for IT organizations are the hundreds (often thousands) of in-house applications constructed over the years. The vast majority of these have not been SOA enabled. Those ‘lumbering apps’ are also inclusive of the LOB need. There’s valuable data trapped in those in-house apps that must be freed.

Integrating to applications will require more frequent and varied connections with real-time and on-demand communications. These integrations may be more permanent links to applications or have ‘throw-away’ integration conditions.

The LOB is forcing the application integration challenge to the forefront of the IT stack. Applications are the real-time component of the raging BIG DATA frenzy. The day is coming, when the LOB will self-serve most of their application and website interactions.

The data wine cellars of the enterprise will be cared for by the IT stewards, but the Line Of Business wants FISH.

By: John Yapaola

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

Do you dare to step out of your comfort zone? The world is changing at a faster and faster pace, especially in the world of IT.

Driven by the explosion of internet connectivity, distribution of data sources, and the number of legacy and networked applications, impatient business demands for IT projects are growing both in numbers and in complexity.

Line of Business needs projects delivered yesterday and with data as fresh as in the original data source. “Rotten” data is no longer acceptable.

In a situation like this, the traditional methods of working often fall short, something that can be very difficult to realize when changes happen gradually. Things don’t get out of control from one day to the next, but over months and years, until it’s too late.

I tried to illustrate the situation in the 3D graph above. The area of control (blue) is gradually turning out of control (red).

• Data demand has moved from batch to real-time
• Complexity has increased with the distribution of applications and data source
• Business urgency requires unrealistic time-to-market goals
• Number of IT projects is growing, but the budget is not

In a changing environment like this, we constantly need to challenge our processes and tools.

So my question to you is: “Are you ready to change the way you do things? Do you dare to step out of your comfort zone?”

If not, you’ve got a problem. You might not see this problem on a daily basis; it’s one of those problems that slowly sneaks up on you until one day it’s too late to fix.

It’s happened many times before, just look at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), the hugely successful mid-size computer company back in the 80s which basically died overnight; they did not step outside their comfort zone and subsequently disappeared.

Kapow Software’s revolutionary innovation, the Kapow Extraction Browser (which by the way is the only purpose-build integration browser on the market), has proven to help hundreds of IT projects overcome these challenges and make an easy jump from the blue to the red area.

By leveraging the fact that all applications today either have an API or GUI, where data and transactions can be accessed and controlled, means you no longer are dependent on the data and application owners. That’s a big deal. No more rewriting of legacy apps and no more begging the application owner to provide APIs. Just go do it.

That is a new way of thinking and new paradigm. Are you ready for it?

Not only does it work, it’s proven by more than 500 customers worldwide. It’s also delivering incredible business value and business agility among your competitors.

Step out of your box and try Kapow Software yourself!

By: Stefan Andreasen

Data assembly is now the biggest barrier to good analytics

Business Intelligence continues to become more and more strategic to companies in order to compete in today’s global economy. Every department is now using analytics to better understand financials, business processes, customers, competitors and market trends – critical understanding needed to optimize execution.

As we all know, analytics is no better than the data behind it, and thus discovery and assembly of data has become an ever more important part of successful business intelligence.

As your company ecosystem grows beyond your firewall into partner apps, competitor websites and social networks, data rapidly spreads and more and more data assembly is now tied up in manual harvesting methods or the purchase of dubious data from vertical information providers.

This means that the knowledge worker spends more time with Data Discovery and Data Assembly, leaving less time for analysis of and execution on the results.

I often see scenarios where knowledge workers spend more than 50% of their time on just data assembly, time which takes away from analysis, reporting and execution.

This is not good.

And it’s exactly why more companies rely on automating the data assembly process. Finding methods to easily and scalably instruct which data to get from where and how to transform it into the needed format – basically they look for a solution to do automated data delivery.

The good news is that this solution already exists. The Kapow Katalyst platform is proven by more than 500 companies all over the world.

Here’s a concrete example. Fiserv, a large financial services company, needed to understand the value of their assets in real-time for compliance reasons. To solve this problem the treasurer hired a group of people to manually log-in to Fiservs accounts spread over more than 300 banks in more than 20 countries. This was expensive, error-prone, and data was often outdated.

Consequently, Fiserv looked for an automated solution and found Kapow Katalyst. Within 3 months they had built Kapow ETL robots that could automatically log-in to the web front-end of Fiserv accounts at all 300 banks and pull out the required information. Not only did this relieve the knowledge workers from manual data assembly it also gave the treasurer real-time data for point-in-time regulatory compliance.

Needless to say this created a lot of value for Fiserv.

I recommend you read the whitepaper, Hyper Management of Working Capital, written by Thomas W. Warsop, Group President for Fiserv.

By: Stefan Andreasen

Cloud Integration is more than just pre-existing connectors and SalesForce integration

As companies move their IT infrastructure and business applications to SaaS and the cloud it creates increasing need “cloud integration”, the ability to integrate data between applications in the hybrid world of internal apps, cloud apps and business partner apps.

Many Cloud Integration companies claim to offer a complete solution for integrating cloud and SaaS apps, but I claim they are all incomplete. Why?

If you check their demos and use-cases you quickly realize they provide a solution that only works if you have access to existing (and documented) web service APIs. And consequently, most of their examples are centered around salesforce.com integration and salesforce.com APIs.

This approach does not apply to the real cloud world – a world that is far from homogenous, but rather a hybrid, fragmented, and distributed world.

A cloud integration solution is only complete if it can integrate all applications in the cloud, whether they have Web Service APIs or not.

Today there are more than 200 million websites/applications on the internet, and many have complex features and data structure behind them. In this more holistic, big picture, only a fraction of these millions of websites are covered by documented APIs, making most traditional cloud integration solutions all but incomplete. The likelihood that your next cloud integration project will not be covered by “standard” connectors is very high, and therefore you need a cloud integration platform that can integrate to any layer in the application stack: database (SQL), web service (SOAP, REST), or through the presentation layer (HTML, AJAX).

Based on the patended Kapow Extraction Browser that leverages any HTML/AJAX application interface as an API if no web services API is present, Kapow Katalyst is the only Cloud Integration platform that has a complete data extraction, data integration, data transformation and data migration solution for your cloud integration challenges.

Proven by more than 500 customers world-wide, Kapow Katalyst is the only cloud integration platform that provides total connectivity and total data delivery in the cloud, in the enterprise and with your business partners.

Are you ready for your next cloud integration project?

By: Stefan Andreasen

“Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin.”
-  Bob Dylan  1963

Fast forward almost 50 years to 2010 and this Dylan verse offers a modern-day perspective on recent developments in the corporate enterprise, as business users set down new demands (expectations) for the access and use of data.

Economic downturns can be painful, but often have a positive effect on companies by forcing clarity of business execution.  Hardened product/service deliverables and timelines suddenly become indisputable for managers and employees.  Expensive IT projects and initiatives previously thought to be valuable to the Company are ‘rudely’ terminated in favor of genuine efficiency demands, with the goal of lowering transactional costs of the Company.  The Lines of Business (LsOB) and IT organizations are given very specific marching orders: ‘Do more with less and do it faster and better than before!’

Are you “Waiting on IT” in an impatient business climate?

‘Clouds’ have gathered in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the perfect storm for change is imminent.  An Economic Downturn, Cloud Computing, and Social/Mobile media are driving rapid and transformational change in the way the LsOB will consume and distribute information in the modern enterprise to their partners and customers.

The business users’ insatiable need for access to data in all of its forms and from as many sources has created enormous friction for IT.    As the traditional gate-keeper of corporate data, IT’s role is to provide the means to make data-delivery easier for the business with integrated data being an expectation of the business user.

So why has data integration in the enterprise fallen so far behind in recent years?  In Clay Christiansen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” there is a passage on new product development in the construction industry and the use of older machines prior to a disruptive innovation.  The excavator specifically triggered an analogy for me, as it relates to the current state of data integration in the enterprise.

The excavator is a massive piece of machinery to acquire, operate and maintain.  It requires highly-skilled specialists to run with the primary function of moving massive amounts of earth, in bulk.

As you can see in the graphic, the excavator approach to data integration (purple area) worked well, keeping pace with the distribution of data up until the late 90’s.  From there, the explosion of data from web apps commenced (red triangle) and has continued to accelerate year after year.   The data requirements of the business user changed, and as a result, IT has been overrun with rapidly expanding data demands as new data sources are discovered on what seems like a daily occurrence.  Using traditional, excavator-like machinery for these modern data integration projects has proven to be just too expensive and cumbersome.

In fairness to IT, the use of an excavator to address these dynamic integration projects was (and still is) an unfair disadvantage for IT.   Someone needed to invent the modern data integration equivalent of the BOBCAT, an agile, industrial strength, versatile, data integration platform that is inexpensive to operate and maintain; that can be quickly deployed for on-demand integration needs and used for the continuous progression of enterprise-extensible application lifecycles.

Today, Kapow introduces the Kapow Extraction Browser TM, the first and only web browser purpose built to extract, transform, integrate and migrate data from apps in the enterprise, on the web, and in the cloud.  Data is extracted from any layer in the application stack:  database, app logic and/or presentation layer.

Kapow KatalystTM – Browser-based data integration – a pragmatic new approach to data integration – No APIs required – No dependencies

The emergence of the browser as the defacto standard for data viewing has defined the linkage for business users to their data.  Brisk, mobile adoption and social media amplification are driving new data demands to the forefront of importance for the LsOB as the corporate enterprise ecosystem expands.   IT must begin to anticipate and adapt to these powerful business trends.

Business Users are fast-tracking the extensibility of the corporate enterprise by surfacing new applications for delivery on newer and less encumbered devices.  They will need assistance in dealing with these very real, dynamic and complex data movements. The opportunity for IT to step up and bridge this modern integration chasm for the LsOB has arrived.  Browser Integrated Data is the new road traveled – but get out of the way…

“…If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin.”

By: John Yapaola

I recently attended a CIO event where the hot discussion topic was about how, when and why we should move our applications to the cloud and SaaS.

What surprised me was the main concern was less about moving applications and data in to the cloud but more about how do we get out of it?

And that is actually a really good question.

For obvious reasons SaaS vendors have little interest in customers ever moving away from their applications – they want to be as “sticky” as possible and grow their business.

For example, how many times do you hear about customers moving away from Salesforce? I’ve never heard of any, but I have heard many say that SaaS vendors turn up prices over time, so it’s not unlikely that someday soon you will start to hear more and more CIOs asking about how to “exit” the cloud, or at least how to move from one SaaS vendor to another.

The problem with migrating from a SaaS vendor is that you don’t own access to the database. The only way you can access and potentially move your data is using the API supplied by the SaaS vendor.

But because of the SaaS vendor’s desire to create “stickiness” you will likely not find all the features in these APIs for a pain-free migration to another SaaS vendor, or even back inside your firewall.

Fortunately there is a solution; it’s called “Browser-based Data Integration” by Kapow Software.

Browser-based Integration can access all the data and business logic in any SaaS application without any need for APIs which enables you to easily extract your data, transform it to your new desired format, and then load the data into a new SaaS application (also without an API), or load the data back into your database.

VOILA! Now you can very quickly move from one SaaS application to another, or even migrate back to an application on your private cloud. No APIs required.

Come learn more at www.KapowSoftware.com.

By: Stefan Andreasen