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

In a recent whitepaper for CIOs, Forrester analysts Ted Schadler and John C. McCarthy define mobile as the manifestation of a broader shift to new “systems of engagement”. These systems according to Forrester “help firms empower their customers, partners, and employees with context-aware apps and smart products to help them decide and act immediately in their moments of need”. This type of connectivity shifts more power to individuals, who can now serve themselves to check account status, make a purchase, view information or conduct a transaction – all via mobile devices.

There are multiple examples across many industries where mobility has taken the engagement to different levels, delivering business value and securing unique competitive advantages. Audi, who was recently honored the 2012 Connected Car of the Year awards, is one of these examples. The award spotlights vehicles with technology that strikes the right balance between safety, convenience, and infotainment. Audi A8 was selected for its unmatched Audi connect™ infotainment system. The leading automobile manufacturer wanted to provide real-time answers to location-based travel queries from its A8’s in-dash mobile navigation system. Audi recognized the power of engagement and leveraged mobility to innovate with a unique smart product that received recognition from industry experts and most importantly high-end customers. Audi delivers real-time data feeds from multiple sources about weather, restaurants, gas prices, traffic, construction and road updates directly to the Multi Media Interface in-car computer system. Audi is using mobility to redefine the driver’s everyday experience through access and connectivity to real-time information that is accurate, relevant and timely.

It is always a pleasure to help your customers introduce compelling new products, become leaders in their markets and receive industry-wide recognition for it. Kudos to Audi for their innovative business approach!

By: Hila Segal, Director, Product Marketing

Looking at the 2011 trends from ProgrammableWeb, the number of available APIs registered in their API Directory has once again doubled. What I find most interesting is that the REST web services now outnumber the SOAP web services by a factor of four.

Even Salesforce decided their original SOAP API could no longer stand alone and added a REST API in late 2010, acknowledging that REST is now the preferred choice for application integration due to easy implementation and deployment. Its lightweight nature is a good fit when creating mobile or web-based applications, both since the client app doesn’t need extensive libraries to be able to interact with the server and because SOAP has a much higher overhead in terms of bandwidth, which can negatively affect the perceived performance of the app.

Internally in many enterprises, SOAP is still used as the protocol over which the services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) interact. However, despite the similarity of the acronyms, the components in a service-oriented architecture can just as easily interact using REST or other protocols. In fact, as many companies begin exploring hybrid integrations, leveraging the strengths of both in-house and cloud applications, it becomes crucial for any successful integration product to be able to consume both SOAP and REST web services.

In a hybrid world, the type safety of SOAP web services is of less importance, as the data transferred between cloud and in-house applications will most likely need to be validated and reformatted at the integration point anyway. Also, REST web services lend themselves easily to caching — riding on standard mechanisms — which can be important when the traffic between in-house systems and private and public clouds continues to increase.

My prediction is that in 2012, any CIO who is considering API-enabling an application — either to consume the service internally or to expose external APIs for partners and mobile or web applications — will be looking first and foremost at REST as the technology of choice.

By: Anne-Sofie Nielsen

Mornings at my house are very hectic. However, in today’s connected world it’s no longer the paper but a quick glance at my smartphone while packing lunch boxes or fixing a bowl of cereal for the kids that helps me keep up-to-date with general news but also headlines that are relevant for my job. Yesterday it was the figures published by research firm Canalys that caught my attention. Mobile devices and smartphone shipments topped PCs for the first time ever, by 73 million units. Whereas this is an important shift, I was more intrigued by what this means for enterprise mobility then any assumptions on the future of desktops and laptops.

I have been in the mobile industry since the days where ringtones and icons were the killer app and therefore it’s a personal joy for me to see IDC announce 2012 the year of Mobile Ascendency and Gartner predicting that by 2015, enterprise mobile app development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber PC projects by 4 to 1. These are all validations that mobility is changing the way we connect with people and information in our personal lives and in the work place.

Over the past several years, more and more companies across multiple vertical industries have discovered the benefits mobility can offer by improving employees’ productivity and better engaging and retaining customers. According to a survey of U.S. companies conducted by The Yankee Group, many are prioritizing investments in mobile applications over traditional IT projects.

However, several obstacles have limited company-wide deployments of mobile technologies for many organizations including security and device fragmentation but also the complexity of mobilizing the variety of legacy applications and existing websites they already have in place. With mobility being so ubiquitous and smartphones now becoming a mass-market proposition, companies need to be able to quickly and cost effectively mobile-enable existing enterprise applications and services so they can take full advantage of the mobile computing revolution.

At Kapow Software, we’ve worked with companies in financial services, automotive, education and other vertical markets to mobilize enterprise applications. It’s already clear these projects are critical for the business but too often they get abandoned due to high complexity, extended timelines and high costs.

Your employees are already demanding mobile access to company information and systems beyond email and your customers are expecting everything you offer on the web to be available through the mobile device. Make 2012 the “year of enterprise mobility ” in your organization and start extending existing assets to the mobile device for the use of your employees, customers or partners.

By: Hila Segal, Director, Product Marketing

One of the latest, more popular trends in IT is consumerization. Mobile has a lot to do with this as employees want to use their personal phone for work, but consumerization goes far beyond accessing enterprise apps on a mobile device. As I see it, consumerization is about bringing consumer expectations to the enterprise. As with Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter, you don’t need a manual to learn how to use these apps, yet they often exceed the demands that the enterprise requires. They scale to hundreds of millions of users and are cutting edge in terms of ease of use, security, scalability, cost effectiveness, and reliability.

So why can’t consumerization be applied to more traditional IT solutions that typically require custom coding, consultants, and third-party dependencies?

Let me be the first to introduce the term, “consumerization of integration.” Need a minute to think that one over? If anything is more in need of consumerization — and less likely to be consumerized — it’s application integration. Can integration be self-service, scalable, collaborative, intuitive, cost effective, and easy to use? Absolutely.

The “traditional approach” to integrating applications is a programmer’s dream — lots of coding, complex infrastructure, built to handle extreme volume and deliver blistering performance. It’s great for internal integration with existing APIs and numerous dependencies on consultants, time, money, and third-party vendors. This is a very IT-centric, tech-heavy proposition to integrate applications. It’s also very inflexible; it takes a lot of planning and is difficult to change.

Yet when you consider who benefits from integrating applications to automate manual business processes, create efficiencies, innovate, and move the company forward, it’s line-of-business (LOB) employees. These people need more agility — to create new products and services, to improve productivity, and to enhance business processes. They need “retail”-level integration, which has to be flexible, agile, easy to use, and easy to update as conditions change.

Kapow Software’s Katalyst Application Integration Platform gives LOB users the ability to intuitively create, without coding, automated workflows that integrate applications in real-time without having to wait months for someone else to do the work. This is huge because LOB workers can see the applications and data they need to access, yet until now they were unable to automate the access, transformation, migration, and integration of that data or application. So we’ve empowered the LOB with a “do-it-yourself” solution.

We by no means bypass IT. Katalyst Application Integration Platform is widely loved and adopted by IT departments — more than 500 at some of the largest global companies — because we allow CIOs to focus their efforts and resources on more strategic projects, while enabling LOB users to satisfy their own needs with a robust, enterprise-grade automation and integration platform.

This is what we call “delivering time to value.”

By: Rick Kawamura

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

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

There is huge growth in mobile everywhere. Every day we see this by the proliferation of fancy mobile devices like iPhone, Android, and iPad, but what we might not consider as strongly is how we all shift more and more of our internet activities over to mobile devices.

Is this possibly the end to PCs and Laptops?

Read this article Bye-Bye, PCs and Laptops from the Wall Street Journal online to learn more.

But how does your future company growth on mobile compare to your growth on the internet?

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures gives a great perspective in the article Mobile Economics Will Trend Toward Web Economics.

On the internet you pay a fixed monthly fee for “unlimited” access, while traditionally on mobile devices you paid per minute. Not so anymore. With high speed 3G and 4G networks and tons of mobile applications like Skype you can already make calls from your mobile without a per minute charge, plus you can leverage an ever increasing amount of mobile marketplaces, monitoring services, and automation services directly from your mobile device without the need for a fixed internet connection or PC.

So how does this affect your business?

Well you better have a mobile enablement strategy, and you better get your B2C/B2E applications mobile enabled before you miss the boat, because your customers are already mobile, and the more your procrastinate, the more market share you could lose.

As soon as you ask your IT department to mobile enable your B2C marketplace or B2E productivity tool, your first challenge will begin.

Most of the applications your company owns have been written over several years, without the slightest thought they would one day need to be modernized for mobile devices. Before you can even consider extending these web applications to mobile, you need to API or Web Service enable them to have a solid interface foundation upon which you can build your new mobile interfaces. Unfortunately, the most common answer you’ll hear back from IT is:  “it will take more than a year to mobile enable our current applications”.

One dramatically different and much faster approach to “fix” this is to just “wrap” your existing applications into web services. Kapow Katalyst can do this for you in days or weeks, rather than the months or years of traditional recoding projects.

Check out how Audi, Pearson, and other large international companies have succeeded with an ultra-fast go-to market mobilization solution.

It’s actually mind-boggling how fast the right technology can get you mobilized.

Check it out.

By: Stefan Andreasen