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

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

I recently read a great article about Data Urgency and how that relates to Data Value by Robin Bloor.

Robin’s writes “Data is urgent if it loses value while the receiver is waiting for it”.

Just think about the following analogy.

When you go to the supermarket to buy an apple, the price you’re willing to pay is directly related to how closely the apple looks like one you’d pick off a tree yourself, like this:

On the other if that apple isn’t fresh and tasty looking, it has no value at all.

This apple loses all its value between the time it was picked fresh and delicious from the tree and when it rotted and was delivered to you completely worthless.

Today I presented at the Corda Visual Evolution conference in Las Vegas.  I presented on “Using Kapow to enhance Corda CenterView with real-time Web data” where I discussed data urgency and how it relates to value.

One of the customer examples I presented was Fiserv and how they use Kapow to automatically aggregate financial account information from more than 300 banks in 10 countries and display the data in Corda’s CenterView dashboard for point in time regulatory compliance.

Previously, the treasury department had no other way to collect the bank data than to manually login to each of the 300 banks and cut and paste (i.e. pick) their financial transaction data into a spreadsheet. Due to the time it took to manually collect the data, not only was the data inaccurate, and thus out of compliance, but errors often arose due to the error-prone methods of manual data collection.

Thomas W. Warsop, Group President at Fiserv, wrote a detailed white paper about how “technology supports the work of corporate treasury” which you can download here to learn more.

Within Kapow’s customer base of almost 500 customers we see more and more examples of how “flawless data” is now “picked” 100% automatically, delivering critical real-time value to our customers.

The urgency of valuable data requires real-time automated data collection.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

More and more people raise the question: “What is the next big thing on the web? Is it web 3.0? When does it come?”

This week I was part of great debate on exactly this topic on the Information Management DM Radio show. You can find the recording here: Web 3.0 — Are We There Yet? (I am on about 40 minutes into the recording).

It was a great panel of industry thought leaders including Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters who talked about the OpenCalais initiative, Jim Kobielus from Forrester, Robin Bloor from Bloor Group and of course the always inspiring DM Radio hosts Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson.

Eric Kavanagh opened up by referring to a presentation by Eric Schmidt from Google on Web 3.0.

In the heated debate on a topic like Web 3.0 we certainly heard a lot of opinions, but I think everybody agreed that Web 3.0 includes features like:

• Programmatic/automated access to any information or process on the web, often referred to as the “semantic web” or the “API enabled web”.
• A personal robot that knows what you want, provides alerts and advice on time critical matters, performs automated shopping for you based on your purchase behavior, and even balances your bank account. Scary, but very useful.

The way I see it, there are almost 200 million active websites (not including web applications inside company firewalls) based on the standards HTTP(S), HTML and JavaScript/AJAX. So for Web 3.0 to deliver on the promise anytime soon it needs to leverage these existing standards to access all web information and perform all web processes on these 200 mill websites.

Luckily this is exactly what the Kapow Web Data Server does and this is exactly what almost 500 customers of Kapow Technologies are increasingly using Web Data Services for. They turn the web into a database of programmatic interfaces to data and automate all off those processes everyone is doing both in their professional and personal lives on the internet.

If you want a more background information, here is a great article I recommend you read: How Web 3.0 Will Work.

Web 3.0 is indeed an interesting topic, let’s keep the discussion going.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Tune in and join Stefan as a guest on DM Radio’s broadcast, “A Tactical Approach to Enterprise Data Integration“, this Thursday, January 28, at 3PM EST.  Learn more about how Web Data Services delivers timely, trusted, web data for enterprise data integration.

On the front lines of enterprise data integration, practitioners employ a whole host of tactics in order to deliver timely, trusted, valuable data. These days, a wide range of options are available for gathering, cleansing and delivering enterprise data. From Web scraping to federated data management, ETL to ELT, open-source to the traditional heavy lifting done by major vendors – the data integration practice is more mature than ever. Tune into this episode of DM Radio to learn how the modern enterprise can mix and match tactics to suit practically any information need. We’ll talk to industry analyst Philip Russom of TDWI, plus Ilan Sehayek of Jitterbit, Peter Tran of Composite Software, and Stefan Andreasen of Kapow Technologies.

Click over to DM Radio on the Information Management site for more details.

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

I’m excited about the recent buzz around real-time data and its importance in driving today’s business decisions.

I recently attended both the Web 2.0 Summit and IBM’s Information On Demand (IOD) conference.  I found it interesting that two very different venues both put a lot of focus on the growing importance of real-time data

At IOD, Stephen Mills, SVP and Group Executive of IBM SWG, was asked about the single most exciting, innovative aspect of Information Management today.  He replied that applications today are more predictive because they leverage more real-time data than ever.  Technology enables us to deal with larger quantities of data and apply intelligence in real-time to predict the future (and prevent catastrophes such as power outages, epidemics, and terrorist attacks), which help us do a better job of planning our businesses.  The net-net is making a “smarter planet” for the future.

Which reminds me of this “IBM Smart Products:  Creating Insight for your business” video where I talk about the importance of reporting with relevant and timely data to make your business more competitive.

The Web 2.0 Summit also placed a strong emphasis on the power of real-time data.  The closing session featured Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly discussing the future of the internet. Tim B-L mentioned how he originally invented the World Wide Web based on a fellowship at CERN where he worked on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition.  Basically the internet was invented to be a “sandbox” to find and share data. The discussion then moved to how the Web one day will be powering dynamic applications or widgets that can connect to any data available on the web. I could not help equating this to mashups connecting real-time to real-time web data.

My prediction is that the business landscape is becoming ever more competitive and distributed and real-time web data will be a fundamental necessity for businesses to make real-time predictions.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Listen to Stefan on IBM Rational’s Software Channel as he discusses agile business application development using Kapow and EGL.  Stefan focuses on how Kapow and IBM help developers with a more dynamic, iterative development process to better meet the needs of Line of Business owners.

Consider this scenario:  A large tanker carrying hazardous material suffers propulsion system failure in the Gulf of Mexico.  How does one actively manage this emergency in real-time and what is the correct course of action to get the vessel safely to the nearest port, avoid further disasters, and alert nearby ships, oil platforms, and environmental agencies?  The smart guys over at IBM created a very compelling Maritime Domain Situational Awareness Mashup using three key principles:

•    Discovery, normalization, and fusion of multiple disparate data sources
•    Display multiple layers of related data in a geospatial map aiding situational awareness and analysis
•    Applies business rules to detect situations; automate task procedures, and guide user interaction where dictated by procedure, best practices, or workflow

IBM defines Situational Awareness as “the understanding of data and events within a given space and time and understanding the meaning in the present and near future [and] deal with multiple sources of data… often rendered in a… map”.  Needless to say, pulling real-time web data from multiple sources to make time-critical decisions can be applied not only to emergency situations, but also to anti-terrorism, financial forecasting, price monitoring, competitive intelligence and fraud detection, just to name a few.

What is interesting here is the critical dependency on Web Data to deliver the full value of a Mashup. All the data used in the Maritime example (vessel information, weather, tide schedules, port locations, and nearby ship routes) is only available through public websites (most of which have no APIs).

The real-time access and REST service-enablement to this critical, situational data  was accomplished with Kapow OnDemand.

This is just another example of how Web Data Services can be used to power mission critical Situational Awareness by leveraging the gold-mine of data sources available on the Web (including public web, as well as federal, government and partner web sites).

We’re proud to the have creators of this mashup joining us in our booth at the IBM Information on Demand Conference to show this compelling demonstration.  If you are at the show, come by and check it out.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Please tune in to hear Stefan and Jim Kobielus on Dana Gardner’s Briefings Direct Podcast, ”Web data services extend data access and distribution beyond the RDB-BI straitjacket”.  Dana moderates an intriguing discussion on making the most of Web Data Services for Business Intelligence, focusing on web data volume, relevancy and timeliness, as well as access, monetization, enablement, governance, security, and the unification and converging of structured and unstructured data.  And in looking towards the future, Jim and Stefan weigh in on the impact of cloud computing on Web Data Service tools.

Jim is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, and an expert on data warehousing, advanced analytics, and business intelligence.

Enjoy the Podcast!