Kapow Katalyst Blog

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

Today is a huge milestone, not only for Kapow Software, but also for all those companies looking to extend their business on the Salesforce platform.

Last year as a sponsor at Dreamforce 2011, I was amazed to learn Dreamforce is now the largest conference in the enterprise software industry – even larger than Oracle Openworld.

But what was also apparent was the massive integration challenges Salesforce customers face. This was evident not only from the numerous customers I had the chance to speak with, but also from the large number of System Integrators and Cloud Integration sponsors (and the sizes of the booths) that solve SalesForce integration problems.

So here at Kapow Software we said, “Enough is enough. Let’s fix this once and for all. Salesforce customers should spend their money somewhere other than on Salesforce integration consultants.”

Our goal was to build this for Cloudforce this week, and I am proud to say that today we are releasing Kapow Katalyst Apex™ Generator for Salesforce®, the first and only truly self-service integration solution for the Salesforce platform, Force.com and Salesforce Visual Workflow.

It works in 4 easy steps, all with no coding, and all without any dependency on missing APIs or missing connectors. It’s completely self-service.

1. Build and test the integration to any web app in Katalyst DesignStudio. It won’t take much longer than to click through that web application once in a normal web browser. You can even combine multiple apps, Excel documents, XML feeds, SQL databases or web services all at once and from anywhere.
2. Click to upload it to the Katalyst Management Console for roles-based sharing with anyone in your company.
3. Click to launch the Kapow Katalyst APEX Generator, type in your Salesforce credentials/security token and click the bottom to generate, test and automatically upload the APEX connector.
4. Now you can use it directly from Salesforce Visual Workflow, or when building APEX apps on Force.com.

With more than 500 customers relying on Kapow Katalyst for busines critical integrations all over the world, I am now truly honored to offer a uniquely agile integration solution to all Salesforce users.

How about security? You decide where to do the integration – in the cloud, on-premise, or both. If your security policy won’t allow for inbound integration from the cloud, just install Kapow Katalyst on-premise.

You will be amazed how easy integrations can be and how fast you can respond to ever changing business needs, streamline manual business processes or build cool new innovative prototypes that can change your business forever.

By: Stefan Andreasen

Never before has it been more important for CEOs and CIOs to leverage information technology to automate their businesses. Increasing the operational efficiency of the existing workforce will be one of the primary drivers of business growth for years to come, and IT will be the means to deliver this.

This demand for process automation is creating a boost for BPM (Business Process Management) and BPA (Business Process Automation) products. Products like IBM Business Process Manager, Oracle Business Process Management or the new Visual Workflow from Salesforce.

So what does automation have to do with API-enabled applications?

Well, in order to improve workforce efficiency, business processes must be streamlined and manual processes must be fully automated.

This means that every application in a business process flow must be able to talk to other applications automatically, and until now the only way applications could talk to each other was through APIs.

So if you had no APIs, you could forget about automation. If you have been using any of the standard BPM products on the market, you know what I’m talking about. Basically this barrier is the biggest flaw with all of the existing BPM products — they depend on APIs that often don’t exist.

And it gets worse:

New web-based business apps are being cranked out at higher and higher volume. These applications are everywhere: inside your business, residing in the cloud (SaaS apps), and at your business partners’ or customers’ (B2B apps) locations. These are the applications that power some of the most important processes in your business:

1. Pricing Comparison
2. HR Processes
3. B2B Processes
4. Financial Account Aggregation
5. Supply Chain Optimization
6. Data Collection
7. Regulatory Compliance
8. Competitive Price Monitoring
9. Social Media Monitoring
10. Marketing Intelligence
11. Financial/Equity Research
12. Legal Evidence Collection
13. Management Reporting

These applications, more often than not, do not have documented APIs, making integration and, therefore, business process automation, almost impossible until now.

But there is a new approach to quickly API-enable any application in order to automate your business processes.

An enterprise-class application integration platform like Kapow Katalyst features a built-in Automation Browser that lets you wrap any web application as if it already had a documented API — essentially API-enabling the application and making it ready for those important automation projects.

This not only eliminates the need to rewrite internal applications, but also eliminates the challenge of working with external applications you cannot rewrite such as B2B and SaaS apps. With Kapow Katalyst you can create a complete integration or automation solution extremely efficiently.

Back to the Myth:

To automate business processes you need your applications to be API-enabled.

True for standard BPM products, False if you use Kapow Katalyst.

Let’s improve business efficiency today.

Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO, Kapow Software

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

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

If there’s one thing to say about IT today it’s that it is incredibly fragmented. There are systems in the cloud and on-premise, and old legacy systems that you really don’t want to touch because you’ve got a nasty suspicion they might be held together by duct tape happily co-existing with state-of-the-art cloud based CRMs.

Well, “happily co-existing” in the sense they are often completely oblivious to each other. And that usually means it’s some poor guy’s job (or more often a large number of poor guys’ jobs, actually) to be moving information from one application to the other. Either that or the left hand of your company doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, which is probably even worse.

So what do you do when you’re tired wasting manpower on application integration – when you’ve got that nagging suspicion that you should be able to automate these workflows? You go to IT. But most IT departments I know are notoriously overworked; yours is probably, too. So if you’re lucky, getting on your knees and begging might eventually (as in possibly next year) get you an API to that legacy system. And let’s hope your competitors are busy tripping over their own shoe laces in the mean time.

More likely, though, IT can’t get you the APIs even if they have nothing else to do. They might not have the source code for the legacy system anymore, or the system could be someone else’s to begin with. It could be a partner system that you want to integrate with, or it could be a cloud service offering. Or it could be that new Google+ social network that everyone is talking about where the developers haven’t gotten around to making the APIs yet but you’re dying to auto-post to base on events in your internal systems.

That’s why you need the competitive advantage of being able to instantly create an API from any web-based application – an API that suits your needs and not just the portions of functionality that happen to have been made available – if any.

With Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform, you can create those APIs yourself. You define the workflow in an integrated development environment, using a patented combination of a purpose-built automation browser and a visual workflow definition by simply navigating the web interface of the application you want to integrate with. On top of this, you can add advanced data transformations as data is pulled from one system into another, with no change to existing systems required.

No less important, Katalyst Application Integration Platform fits nicely into your IT infrastructure, complete with superior monitoring capabilities and integrating seamlessly with your existing LDAP/AD user role management.

Security approved by Salesforce AppExchange.

What are you waiting for? (Oh that’s right, APIs…)

By: Anne-Sofie Nielsen

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

There has been a lot of buzz around the increasing need for APIs, especially around “free” and “open” APIs.

As Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his latest blog on ebizQ, (Open APIs Mature Into a Next-Generation Business Model and Is the Future of SOA Open Source?), APIs (or the lack thereof) are the biggest obstacle for developing next-generation business applications and SOA interoperability.

Why?  First, the APIs have to be available, but they also need to be simpler (for example using REST) and easier to consume by BI tools, agile application environments and mashup builders.

Dion describes how more and more companies are providing open or free APIs to their data as an important part of their business model. These APIs are supplemented by a new line of companies, like StrikeIron and Xignite, who provide APIs to other’s data through an easy data-as-a-service (DaaS) model (check out this article in WSJ, The New Information Goldmine).

This is well aligned with the Open Government Initiative and the new US government data site data.gov where more and more government data will become available. You can read more about this initiative in this article about Digital Democracy.

But can we realistically wait for all relevant data to become “API enabled”?

With more than 5 billion websites today, there is a vast amount of growing, relevant data that is not going to have an API any time soon – if ever. Add to this data locked internally in legacy applications and at your business partners and you can see how unrealistic it is to have APIs for all this data.

This is where Web Data Services and a product like the Kapow Web Data Server become critical.

Web Data Services allow business analysts and agile application developers to instantly create APIs where none exist. The only prerequisite is that you can navigate to and see the data in a normal web browser like FireFox, IE or Safari. This even includes data behind secure, password protected sites, and data on very complex websites powered by AJAX and Flash.

With the powerful combination of open APIs, free government data and the ability to rapidly turn any web application into an API on-demand, we finally have access to any data we need.

This lays the foundation to a new way of working, where business analysts and other decision makers can spend their time building better algorithms, better data visualization, and better analysis because the most critical ingredient behind any business decision today, the data, has become so easily accessible.

By:  Stefan Andreasen