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

Earlier this week TechCrunch posted this article: Google+ API Launch Still Months Away. It was tweeted, liked, and shared over 1100 times, and the passion around why the Google+ APIs are not yet published is stirring quite a discussion as developers clamor to get their hands on the API.

For those of you anxiously waiting for the Google+ API, consider this: Kapow Software successfully integrated Google+ to Salesforce Chatter last week at Dreamforce, and entered it in to the hackathon where we made it to the final round. There was buzz in the audience as to how it was possible to integrate to Google+ when no API existed – enough that the judges had to ask the audience to stop asking questions.

How can Kapow Software integrate Google+ when no APIs exist?

Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform it’s actually very easy. Kapow Software designed a visual flow-chart editor that allows developers to integrate to web applications without requiring APIs. We’ve successfully done this with legacy apps (enterprise, ecommerce, banking, etc.), financial apps (hundreds of banks), partner apps (shipping, payroll, accounting, supplier, procurement, etc.), social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, TripAdvisor, LinkedIn), and hundreds more, including cloud and saas.

To integrate with G+ we used our Kapow Katalyst IDE, the Design Studio. It’s a visual flow-chart editor that automates the building of application integration workflows you can use to access and control any website (or API for that sake). As you create the flow, Design Studio is actually accessing the target website service in real time, so as you build a workflow you’re also testing it, in real-time. When the workflow is complete, you’re also done testing—it’s very productive.

We built automated workflows (“robots”) that login to G+, navigate to the Stream, and submit or extract posts from and to Chatter. A traditional API wasn’t needed because the Katalyst Application Integration Platform leverages the G+ presentation layer as the API. Our Kapow Automation Browser is a purpose-built browser engine, with full understanding of the web page’s structure and JavaScript state, so even sites such as Google+ that are built with cutting-edge AJAX techniques are easy for Katalyst to handle.

It’s easy to create a REST service in the cloud or on premise—with a click of the “Deploy” button you’ve built an API for use by anyone, anywhere, inside or outside your organization. These APIs can include website navigation and business rules as well as access to databases, spreadsheets, documents, file systems or other web services, and much more—all encapsulated in a single service call.

Learn more about Kapow’s Application Integration Solutions or request a free trial!

By: Stefan Andreasen

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

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

Kate Gosselin on Dancing with the Stars Photo Credit: ABC

Can Social Media be used to predict the outcome of Reality TV shows such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars?  We created Reality Buzz based on our real-time automated web data collection platform to find out.

Jennifer Zaino over at Semantic Web wrote a nice article that captures the essence of Reality Buzz and our process of using real-time social media web data to build intelligence in to predictive analytics:  Taking Sentiment Analysis to Dancing with the Stars and American Idol

Check it out.  And if you have the need to automate the access, collection, harvesting, scrubbing, grabbing or scraping or real-time web data to improve market or competitive analysis to improve your strategic decision making, we’re here to help.

By:  Rick Kawamura

Together with my product management team, I am currently out speaking with our customers to gather input for future product roadmap priorities.

It’s always great to meet up with our customers, but in particular, what’s been so rewarding this time is hearing one amazing story after another from our customers on the huge time and cost savings they’ve achieved with the Kapow Web Data Server.

Let me share two of their stories.

First, I talked to a large telecommunications company, a long time customer of ours, who has been using Kapow on 80 data automation projects. One project, with expected revenue of $4.9 million over 3 years, included the assembly of 129,000 listings into a directory, all to be finished within 6-8 weeks.

Performed manually, one listing took 15 minutes to complete, so one person was expected to complete 30 listings per day, or 1200 listings in 8 weeks. Basically 100 employees were required to finish the project on time using traditional manual order-entry methodologies.

Using Kapow they successfully built data automation “robots” that took 44 data fields from the source application, transformed it into 69 target fields, and then automatically loaded them into the target system. The Kapow robots completely automated the interaction with the source and target application Web front-ends, as well as automatically performed all the advanced transformations to convert the source data format to the target data format. With robots they were able to complete 5000 automatic listings per day with a 95% success rate and finish the project in only 4 weeks.

This resulted in an astonishing total savings of $1.3 million and at the same time eliminated the risk of the project not getting done in time.

The second company, a business information provider, was extracting energy related data from a dozen government web sites using manual cut-and-paste. With Kapow they built automated data acquisition robots that saved 2868 hours per year of manual labor for each data source. For 12 data sources this resulted in an astonishing savings of 34,416 hours per year.

I love to hear these stories and it’s always very satisfying to hear a customer tell you directly how much they like and benefit from your solutions.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

While web data, especially social media data, grows exponentially, the vast array of opportunities for using real-time web data to improve analysis and decision making is limited only by your imagination.  These days, companies must incorporate Web data into their intelligence and analysis tools in order to compete. In some industries it’s a matter of survival.

Real-time data is where the answers are.  It’s where market and customer trends are immediately identifiable.  It’s where deals will be won and where winners will claim their trophies.

Reality Buzz

We recently built something 30M Americans can relate to – a way to predict American Idol and other reality show results based on data harvested from popular social media sites.

Every week on American Idol, contestants perform, their fans dial-in their support for their favorites, and the next day contestants are voted off the show.  During the performances, and for several hours after, fans tweet about and discuss their favorites online, showing support for the ones they want to see voted through to the next show.

We scrape thousands of pieces of web data from twitter, Facebook, forums and discussion sites around the web, apply sentiment analysis, analyze the data, and make predictions about the person(s) to be eliminated from the show, all in the span of a few hours.

We built the robots (automated web data collection processes) in a matter of hours.  Now they are automated to collect the data, transform unstructured data into structured data, and load it into a MySQL database.

In the last two weeks starting with the top 12 contestants, we’ve successfully predicted the American Idol contestant to be eliminated hours before the elimination show aired.  For more information on our latest predictions and to learn more, please visit Reality Buzz on Facebook.

Imagine what you could do for your business with Kapow’s Web Data Server and a few hours creating Kapow robots.  Real-time web data can fuel predictive analytics capabilities to give your company an unfair advantage.

Over 400 Kapow customers are jumping in with both feet.  What’s stopping you?  Learn more on our Kapowtech.com website, or contact us for a Free Trial of the Kapow Web Data Server.

By:  Rick Kawamura

“Information, thanks to the internet, is growing at breakneck, exponential speeds. This has proven to be both an opportunity and a curse for businesses. With all this data abundance, organizations of all sizes struggle to access and act upon it in a timely and cost effective way. Just think about the impact to your business if you could automatically add high-value Web data to your market intelligence, pricing intelligence, financial intelligence or any other business intelligence application. Until recently, this seemed like an impossible feat, or at least cost prohibitive based on the man hours involved.”

The above is an outtake of an article I recently wrote for ebizQ, the full article is available here and provides more insight into the emerging web data services market, common web data access challenges and real world use cases and benefits of web data services. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

Web Data – Why Top Business Leaders Depend On It And You Should To

Here at Kapow Technologies we just finished an outstanding quarter having signed our 400th enterprise customer, closed 87 deals, and doubled our subscription revenue mix.  We’re proud to see our hard work paying off despite tough economic times.  For more details check out our press release.

More and more businesses are seeing the critical value Kapow’s solutions and technology play in creating efficient, agile businesses.

In December I visited an executive at one of our new global enterprise customers who heads a business unit heavily dependent on business applications to perform process automation, data analysis and reporting.

To better serve the business, his company made several efforts over a 10 year period to consolidate data integration on a common platform. First Corba, then SOA. Unfortunately neither of these initiatives lived up to their promise to deliver business applications, business data and process automation at the pace needed to support line of business and growth of the company.  The economic downturn actually created an opportunity to better serve IT business needs by leveraging the Kapow Web Data Server to serve and deliver on LOB’s ever changing needs for additional data sources and more precise, timely data. They simply could not afford to wait for traditional coding approaches to “maybe” deliver on their IT needs in 6 or twelve months. They needed to get things done much more quickly and that is exactly what they are doing with Kapow.

More and more business leaders are putting front-office applications in the cloud or developing them themselves “on demand”.

Welcome to the new world of efficient business IT powered by Kapow Technologies.

By:  Stefan Andreasen