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

The best thing about working in Business Development is meeting with partners and customers. It’s a great way to stay on top of technology trends, and my goal for this blog post is to keep you posted on developments I see on the road.

This year was Kapow Software’s first time exhibiting at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event where the buzz was all about the social enterprise and the value of collaboration and interaction in business and government. Kapow Software, together with our partner Threshold Consulting, made it to the final of the Salesforce Hackathon with a bi-directional integration between Salesforce Chatter and Google+ — a unique social integration feat because Google+ doesn’t support APIs.

We returned to Moscone Center in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. Arik Hesseldahl, in his AllThingsD.com blog, offers an insightful analysis of the rivalry between Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, which we witnessed firsthand. Arik also explains the two visionaries’ divergent views of the cloud, which can be summed up as a hybrid environment vs. the pure cloud.

For our part, we knew our Founder and CTO Stefan Andreasen’s session on automating content migration into Oracle OpenWorld resonated when one attendee said, “it made the conference worth it in its own right.” Oracle and Kapow Software announced a Documentum trade-in campaign with a special offer for customers who are making the move from Documentum to Oracle WebCenter, using Kapow Software’s automated migration tools.

Next on my itinerary were two events for the intelligence community. I have never seen so many different national law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local police departments, as I did at ISS World in DC. They came for training on the technologies, techniques, and legal considerations of intelligence gathering and analysis. Back in California was Suits & Spooks, the so-called anti-conference designed to bring the greatest Silicon Valley entrepreneurs together with US intelligence agencies. (There wasn’t an actual suit to be seen anywhere.)

Having been involved with the technology side of intelligence for over 10 years, I’m astounded by how far we’ve come from simple reports and dashboards. The focus now is on social network analysis, geo-location-based visualization, and enhanced reality. But for all of the advances in analytics and visualization, the greatest challenge with intelligence continues to be getting access to the data, particularly as the majority of the data – big data – is outside the control of any one organization.

Last week presented the dilemma of choosing between two events: Pyxis Mobile’s Connect 2011 Summit and GEOINT 2011 Symposium hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF). Kapow Software exhibited and presented at both, but I ended up choosing the Pyxis Mobile conference – and I’m glad I did. We met with a lot of great customers and partners, and my hat goes off to Chris Willis and Pyxis for organizing such a successful event. What was most enlightening for me is the impact that tablets (iPads and Androids) are having on enterprise strategies for mobilization. Most companies are developing strategies to mobile enable enterprise apps and were impressed with Kapow’s ability to integrate web application data without the need for APIs or any other programmable interface. Having resisted mobilization, IT seems to be forced to act finally by the ubiquitous “consumerization” of mobile devices. And tablets are starting to provide to field workers what has been promised for so long.

All in all, technological development in all of these areas is moving at neutrino speed. I’ll do my best to keep you informed. I’m back in the office this week, catching up on everything; hence, the timing of this post.

By: Rory Byrne

We’re excited to be a Silver sponsor at this week’s Salesforce Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco, where we will demonstrate how easy it is to integrate Salesforce and Force.com apps with the most “difficult to integrate” applications – those that have limited or even no APIs.

There are plenty of companies claiming agile, fast integration based on providing pre-built connectors to applications with robust APIs, such as Salesforce, Oracle and a few dozen other apps you all know. As Stefan discussed in his blog post last week (The Growing Pain of Integrating Applications) however, there are many flaws and drawbacks to this approach.

At Dreamforce, we’re demonstrating two integrations that no connector vendor can solve: integrating salesforce chatter and google+ (which has no APIs), and integrating a force.com app with Lotus Notes, which is notoriously known to be virtually impossible to integrate. In either case, Kapow Software is able to provide a real-time, bi-directional integration between these applications without the need for pre-build connectors or APIs.

As Fie pointed out in her blog post (Don’t you just hate begging for APIs), enterprise organizations are struggling to solve the application integration problem for the business partner network, web, legacy, supply chain, or social media applications.

Connector companies that state they are the #1 cloud integrator for any cloud, saas, and on-premise app is enormously exaggerated when they are limited to integrating only apps that have APIs. It reminds me of Henry Ford’s quote from 1901: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” In essence, these connector companies offer integrations, “as long as useful APIs exist”.

Why restrict your ability to integrate applications to a world limited by APIs and connectors? Live in our world. Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform lets you integrate all the apps you want without restrictions on existing connectors or APIs.

We are the first and only application integration platform to enable on-demand, self-service integration without dependencies on APIs. More and more companies are shifting to hybrid environments (on premise and cloud applications) and taking advantage of our unique approach to integration that delivers substantial ROI, very quick time to value, and rapid process automation, while also enabling the integration of applications that were previously impossible to connect due to a lack of APIs.

Declare your Independence from missing APIs

If you have a chance to come to the show, please stop by our booth. We’re giving away two dollar bills. Why? On the back of a $2 bill are our forefathers signing the Declaration of Independence. So come to our booth, see the Google+ and Lotus Notes demos, and join us to “declare your independence from missing APIs!”. We’re also offering free one year licenses to Kapow Katalyst, so what have you got to lose? Stop by the booth this week for more information.

By: Rick Kawamura

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

Cloud Integration is more than just pre-existing connectors and SalesForce integration

As companies move their IT infrastructure and business applications to SaaS and the cloud it creates increasing need “cloud integration”, the ability to integrate data between applications in the hybrid world of internal apps, cloud apps and business partner apps.

Many Cloud Integration companies claim to offer a complete solution for integrating cloud and SaaS apps, but I claim they are all incomplete. Why?

If you check their demos and use-cases you quickly realize they provide a solution that only works if you have access to existing (and documented) web service APIs. And consequently, most of their examples are centered around salesforce.com integration and salesforce.com APIs.

This approach does not apply to the real cloud world – a world that is far from homogenous, but rather a hybrid, fragmented, and distributed world.

A cloud integration solution is only complete if it can integrate all applications in the cloud, whether they have Web Service APIs or not.

Today there are more than 200 million websites/applications on the internet, and many have complex features and data structure behind them. In this more holistic, big picture, only a fraction of these millions of websites are covered by documented APIs, making most traditional cloud integration solutions all but incomplete. The likelihood that your next cloud integration project will not be covered by “standard” connectors is very high, and therefore you need a cloud integration platform that can integrate to any layer in the application stack: database (SQL), web service (SOAP, REST), or through the presentation layer (HTML, AJAX).

Based on the patended Kapow Extraction Browser that leverages any HTML/AJAX application interface as an API if no web services API is present, Kapow Katalyst is the only Cloud Integration platform that has a complete data extraction, data integration, data transformation and data migration solution for your cloud integration challenges.

Proven by more than 500 customers world-wide, Kapow Katalyst is the only cloud integration platform that provides total connectivity and total data delivery in the cloud, in the enterprise and with your business partners.

Are you ready for your next cloud integration project?

By: Stefan Andreasen

I recently attended a CIO event where the hot discussion topic was about how, when and why we should move our applications to the cloud and SaaS.

What surprised me was the main concern was less about moving applications and data in to the cloud but more about how do we get out of it?

And that is actually a really good question.

For obvious reasons SaaS vendors have little interest in customers ever moving away from their applications – they want to be as “sticky” as possible and grow their business.

For example, how many times do you hear about customers moving away from Salesforce? I’ve never heard of any, but I have heard many say that SaaS vendors turn up prices over time, so it’s not unlikely that someday soon you will start to hear more and more CIOs asking about how to “exit” the cloud, or at least how to move from one SaaS vendor to another.

The problem with migrating from a SaaS vendor is that you don’t own access to the database. The only way you can access and potentially move your data is using the API supplied by the SaaS vendor.

But because of the SaaS vendor’s desire to create “stickiness” you will likely not find all the features in these APIs for a pain-free migration to another SaaS vendor, or even back inside your firewall.

Fortunately there is a solution; it’s called “Browser-based Data Integration” by Kapow Software.

Browser-based Integration can access all the data and business logic in any SaaS application without any need for APIs which enables you to easily extract your data, transform it to your new desired format, and then load the data into a new SaaS application (also without an API), or load the data back into your database.

VOILA! Now you can very quickly move from one SaaS application to another, or even migrate back to an application on your private cloud. No APIs required.

Come learn more at www.KapowSoftware.com.

By: Stefan Andreasen