This fall I am excited to be talking about Big Data at the Informatica Maximize Return on Big Data roadshow events across North America.

The theme of the roadshow is centered around solving the return on data equation which Informatica defines as the value of data divided by the cost of data:

Return on Data = Value on Data / Cost of Data

Specifically I am talking about how this applies to what is quickly becoming the most important and fastest growing data domain – “Big Interaction Data”. It is your customers’ blogs and tweets, your competitors pricing information and the data on your partners’ portals. It is unstructured, rapidly changing and provides unique insights that can turn your company into the market leader.

From being almost non-existing a few years back, Big Interaction Data is today growing explosively, with most of that happening on the internet and available as “Web Data”. My previous blog Dynamic pricing with automated competitive price monitoring provides a good example of how the use of Interaction Data can create huge differentiation, drive topline growth and turn companies into winners in their industry.

For many, understanding the huge importance of Big Interaction Data is just in its infancy, but I can assure you this is quickly changing. In my presentation, I give a few other examples of how companies leverage Interaction data. One example is about, Fiserv, a large financial services company who had to monitor point-in-time cash position across 300 partner banks for regulatory compliance. They had no other way of getting the data other than manually logging in to 300 portals and retrieving bank balances. Being able to get this type of data in an automated way was game changing for this organization. So as you can see Big Interaction Data is far more than just social media and provides significant value.

The other side of the equation is the “Cost of Data”. If the data is impossible to get, or very expensive to get, or cheap but out-of-date, then the return will be lower.

The most successful companies will be the ones that put data first, the most relevant data, and leverage technologies to get all that data at a low cost – in real-time.

Here is a snippet video of the presentation I gave in New York earlier this month:

On November 7th I will be presenting again in Atlanta, but you can also meet my colleagues at the San Francisco event on the same day. I will also be speaking in Dallas on November 13th if you happen to be in that area.

Come see me and let’s discuss the topic.

Stefan

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

Do you remember when JavaScript was merely used to add some snappy effects to plain HTML websites; perhaps a drop-down menu that rolled out when you moved your mouse over an object or an image that changed every 5 seconds?

We were a bunch of happy-go-lucky web programmers — script kiddies — back in the mid-90s who could not imagine how much business logic, data transformation, and interactive presentation would be taking place in the user’s browser 15 years later. Sure, data was sometimes dynamically generated, but all that magic took place on our server-side scripts.

When Kapow Software was simply extracting data from the web in the late 90s, we could safely ignore the sprinkles of JavaScript on a website; we could simply go straight to the HTML to get the data. Unfortunately, I still see people trying this approach.

Today even the best script kiddie is going to have an extremely hard time crafting a Perl script that can grab data from a modern website or web app where the information displayed in the user’s browser is the result of executing thousands of lines of JavaScript, pulling data from web services, and transforming that data in sophisticated ways. Even worse: Imagine doing web application integration or business process automation just scripting!

Here at Kapow Software, we quickly realized that disregarding JavaScript when trying to integrate web applications was insufficient. And we made the radical decision to base Katalyst Katalyst on our Integration Engine with Web App Interface that allows you to integrate any modern website or application, including all of the dynamic content generated by JavaScript.

That means that as a Kapow Katalyst user, you can focus on the data or apps you want, rather than having to concern yourself with how the website or web application was originally built.

While it was fun being a script kiddie in the nineties, with today’s dynamic web and the exponential growth in content and sources, scripting has proven extremely unproductive, if not impossible. It’s time to shift the focus away from technical issues and move toward solutions that help you solve your business problems.

By: Anne-Sofie Nielsen

Director of R&D at Kapow Software

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

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

I recently visited one of our customers who uses Kapow Katalyst to automatically extract and normalize job postings from the career/hiring section of client’s corporate web sites.  We actually have several customers using Kapow Katalyst for this type of solution, but this was the first time I heard the phrase “job wrapping”.

To me, job wrapping is a subset of the more general term “web wrapping”, which is a method of wrapping an existing web application, such as a SaaS application integration,  so you can control it automatically in a business process such as extracting or entering data, or perform a transaction such as provisioning a new user in the application.

In Kapow Katalyst you do this by building a “script” or “robot”  that mimics a human navigating through a traditional web browser. You build the robot by typing in a URL, entering login information and navigating the web app to extract data, perform a transaction or apply a business rule or data transformation. Basically the web application is turned into an API or a structured data feed without performing any changes to the source application and thus eliminating the need for IT involvement.

In the job wrapping example this means you could automatically synchronize data on an external corporate jobs section to increase the likelihood someone will find and apply for the job – all without involving traditional IT methodology.

Kapow Katalyst can live either in the cloud or on-premise, so you can even use it to wrap your internal business application as long as it has a web front-end.

Web wrapping is conceptually a very fast way to connect SaaS and other web apps which is actually one of the fastest growing areas for our technology today. I’ll write more about that in a separate blog so stay tuned.

Needless to say, Kapow Katalyst is the leading Web Wrapping platform on the market.

Go wrap!

 

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