Kapow Katalyst Blog

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

“In order for us to integrate with our SAP system, we need an SAP adapter.”

“In order to migrate content to our FileNet WCMS, we need a FileNet Adapter.”

I’m sure you’ve all heard this before.

The reasoning?  Whenever you need to perform data or content migration, you need an adapter.  Or do you?

Companies like iWay Software created a nice business proving the need for adapters to business applications and data/content management systems.

But as the number of data sources and applications multiply, this strategy is proving obsolete. There are simply too many systems in the market to build individual adapters for, and the requirements for each adapter vary more and more with each use case.

Fortunately there is a faster, better solution.

Over the last 5 years any relevant business application or CMS made their system accessible through a web browser.  You can log in and search, view and even enter data through web forms.

Using a Web Data Services product like the Kapow Web Data Server, developers can now leverage this web interface to create custom adapters quickly and easily whenever they need them, and even better, exactly the way they want them. No need to buy a library of adapters, read tons of documentation and then tweak your system to work with the adapter interface.

I visit prospects and customers as often as my schedule permits, and more and more frequently I hear, “We implemented yet another integration/SOA framework only to find it obsolete before it’s even finished”. Needless to say, customers are abandoning the adapter route and whole-heartedly adopting the much more pragmatic Web Data Services solution where they can create adapters “on the fly”.

Consider this – what would be the value to your organization if you could create adapters on demand without the need to recode existing systems or work through bureaucratic procedures to gain application access?  Huge, right?

Please drop me a note and I would be more than happy to share some real-life stories from real-life global 1000 companies who have done just this, giving them unprecedented business agility.  It’s no longer a matter of when and how much, but rather taking an on demand, “just do it” approach to driving business agility.

Learn more:

• Harvest and Serve Web Data from multiple web sources with no coding
• Content Migration Demo loading data into CMS without adapters

By:  Stefan Andreasen

I really enjoyed being a guest on DM Radio’s broadcast last week where we discussed “Innovation in Information Management”.

We live in a time of rapid change through an accelerated flow of information.  The time span between market fluctuations and subsequently the time to make appropriate decisions in direction or strategy is shortening each day.  More than ever it’s become necessary to look into the “crystal ball” to know what’s ahead so we can react quicker (and correctly).

The “old school” solution is to pre-build all the data access you could ever think of so it’s ready when you need it. This is the normal approach of SOA, Data Warehousing and Data Integration products.  It’s very resource intensive with a “something’s bound to stick” approach to providing the right data at the right time.

The “new approach” is to provide IT with the tools so they can deliver relevant, timely data from anywhere in an on-demand fashion when it is needed.

When I was asked, “What is the biggest innovation you have seen in data governance?” I responded that I’ve seen a common thread where most of the innovation is powered by enabling technologies with Web Data.  And it’s not simply a “better, cheaper, faster” approach, but quite honestly a paradigm shift in taking advantage of the accelerated world to turbo-charge business intelligence tools with web data services.

That’s real innovation in an accelerated world.

By:  Stefan Andreasen