Agile Application Integration

A Revolutionary Approach

White Paper

Contents
Application Integration for Todays Challenges .......................................................................... 3 Protecting Your Business Investment in Applications and Data ................................................. 4 Cloud Adoption Demands Agility............................................................................................. 4 Agile Application IntegrationEssential for Business Innovation .......................................... 4 Agile Integration for All of Your Applications.............................................................................. 5 Traditional Data Integration Falls Short .................................................................................. 5 Agile Integration for Data, Applications, and Business Processes .......................................... 5 The Kapow Katalyst Application Integration PlatformBuilt For Agility ................................... 6 How Agile Integration Works .................................................................................................. 6 Enterprise-class Integration with IT......................................................................................... 6 A Complete Agile Integration Solution: Kapow Katalyst ......................................................... 6 Kapow Software at Work ............................................................................................................ 7 Opening a New Market and Enhancing Customer Service...................................................... 7 Application Mobilization of Cloud, SaaS, and On-premise Applications................................. 7 Agile Application Integration for Improved Productivity ........................................................ 8 Kapow Katalyst: Agile Integration for Any Organization ............................................................ 8

Application Integration for Todays Challenges

Traditional data integration techniques were architected for yesterdays batch processing world, but IT has moved beyond to embrace cloud computing. In Gartners 2009 CIO survey, cloud computing ranked #16 as a business prioritybut in just one year it jumped 14 spots up the priority list to #2. Gartner predicts that within two years 80% of Fortune 1000 enterprises will use the cloud at some level.1 For many companies, cloud use will be at significant levels: Gartner has estimated that 30-35% of the IT workload would move to the cloud over the next five years, but the actual rate is outpacing that estimate.2 Government interest in cloud computing ramped up in September 2009 when the U.S. Federal CIO launched the Federal Governments Cloud Computing Initiative. The U.S. Government is the worlds biggest IT buyer, spending over $76 billion annually on more than 1,100 data centers, 10,000 systems, 24,000 web sites, and 272,000 data sets on data.gov alone (up from just 47 data sets in the prior year). Clearly, theres gravitational pull to the U.S. initiative, which will accelerate the general move to the cloud. Cloud computing encompasses a wide range of concepts including private, public, hybrid, and federated clouds, along with various types of cloud services including IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a service). Each of these environments offers different benefits and different integration challengesand the traditional data integration platforms dont measure up to the needs of cloud computing.

INTEGRATION CUTS LABOR COST 88%

As the U.S. Transportation Security Administration began to adopt OMBs hosted LoB HR SaaS solution, they faced a daunting challenge: how to link their legacy, custom EmpowerHR application to their new, hosted PeopleSoft instance. The projected cost of creating an API for the legacy EmpowerHR application was prohibitive, so TSA initially tried a manual, cut-and-paste approachbut that proved to be unworkable.

By turning to Kapow Katalyst for secure, realtime application integration, TSA improved employee services while cutting related labor costs by 88%.

Analyst Q&A with Conference Chair Mike Chuba, http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/data center/analyst-qa.jsp 2 Sreedhar Kajeepeta, Cloud Computing Adoption Rate Speeding Along, April 27, 2010, http://www.trustedcloudservices.com/cloud-computing-adoption-rate-speeding-along

Protecting Your Business Investment in Applications and Data

Expanding your IT portfolio to include cloud-based assets exposes several questions that cloud and SaaS vendors may be unable to answer. For example, just how do you change service providers, or migrate to a new SaaS application? Will there be drift between your on-premises and cloud applications because of barriers to integration? Will you lose control of your cloud applications because you no longer control the databases behind them? Cloud Adoption Demands Agility You need to maintain control of your business systems, but the challenges involved multiply in a hybrid world of private and public clouds. Your applications can live both on-premises and in the cloud, and possibly in multiple clouds. Some of this complexity is Figure 1. Your applications live in an increasingly complex, hybrid world shown in Figure 1, but that tells only part of the complexity story. When your applications are spread across multiple environments, your business-critical data also becomes dispersed around the web, scattered across extranets, intranets, and multiple websites, and locked into Excel, PDF, Word, and XML. Will you be able to maintain control of all this disaggregated data and ensure it stays integrated with your business systems, in real-time? Will you actually be able to change direction as conditions change, and take advantage of capabilities offered by another SaaS vendoror migrate all of your data back to an internal system? The need for agile application integration is clear. Agile Application IntegrationEssential for Business Innovation Mere data integration is not enough, because cloud computing poses a greater challengethe challenge to innovate new business processes. Because even though cloud computing promises new agility to organizations, it can reduce flexibility in these very same organizations. Your business processes can become just as fragmented as the data and applications become as they move from on-premise to the cloud, or from one SaaS provider to another. And this may be the most serious challenge of all because youre at the mercy of your customers, partners, and suppliersforces you cannot control. Only agile application integration will let you innovate the new business processes you will need.

Agile Integration for All of Your Applications

Traditional Data Integration Falls Short Traditional data integration products recognize only two ways to integrate disparate IT systems: At the back-end data layer, using data integration. You can reverse-engineer the database and the business logic that ties the data togetheror hire an army of consultants to do it for you. Either way, its extremely time-consuming and costlyand simply not a viable solution in view of the number of integrations needed in a distributed, hybrid world. This approach is unavailable for SaaS applicationsor for applications owned by your customers, partners, and suppliersbecause direct access to external databases is seldom permitted. At the application logic layer, using an application program interface (API). Although promising at first, only a tiny fraction of the applications you need to integrate offer APIs. Of more than 132 million websites3, for example, only about 3700 have published APIs4. For most of these sitescustomer sites, B2B web applications, partner applicationsintegration that relies on APIs is impossible. Even when available an API may not be ideal. When SaaS vendors want to create customer stickiness the API may not make it easy for you to pack up and leave. And some vendors are able to generate demand for professional services based on the complexity of their API. Case in point: One SaaS vendor offered to handle migrations on a consulting basisfor over $40,000 eachoffsetting years of SaaS benefits.

Agile Integration for Data, Applications, and Business Processes Agile integration supports both traditional methodsdata integration and application integrationbut provides agility those techniques cannot by providing a third way to integrate:

At the presentation layer. Those 132 million active web sites include the B2B web applications
that your partners, suppliers, and customers require your staff to access, as well as the 24,000 U.S. Federal sites we mentioned, and thousands of sites containing data you can use to improve your decision-makingwhether owned by partners or competitors. API-based tools find it impossible to access these applicationsbut this is where real business process innovation is taking place. It also includes sites inside your firewallyour HR systems, CRM apps, sales data, partner price lists, supplier inventory, and so onthat may not have APIs available

3 4

http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ http://www.programmableweb.com/

The Kapow Katalyst Application Integration PlatformBuilt For Agility

The Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform is designed to enable rapid integration of any application, whether its located in the cloud, on a mobile device, or inside your firewall. It eliminates the requirement for APIs by controlling the applications user interfacewhich means that you can integrate the business processes that are behind the websites you access. Kapow Katalyst also accesses databases, files, spreadsheets, PDF and Word documents, XML and JSONand many more data formats, letting you create serious business integrations built for enterprise-class use. How Agile Integration Works Even though a web page may look unstructured, your web browser displays only the part intended for people to see. The browser itself processes a complex structure called the DOM (for Document Object Model) and full understanding of the DOM is essential for a browser to work properly. Katalyst has the same deep understanding of the DOM that a web browser doesbut unlike a web browser, Katalyst can rapidly learn how to automate a series of events. These events, such as clicking on a button, entering login credentials, or copying data from a web page, are the same actions a human user would carry out when using the application. These automated events can be combined with database access, Web service invocation, or other activities to create powerful integrations that cannot be accomplished any other way. Enterprise-class Integration with IT As an enterprise-class product, the Katalyst platform can run any integration on a regular schedule, or on demand. Kapow Katalyst fits smoothly into any IT architecture because any integration can be transformed into a REST or SOAP API with a single click and made available for others to useor if you prefer .NET or Java, automatically generated APIs are available to simplify access. Using these capabilities you can create automated business processes that span your entire value chainby directly linking cloud, SaaS and on-premise applications via their web front-ends. Katalysts deep understanding of the DOM makes it resilient to changes in web page format. A Complete Agile Integration Solution: Kapow Katalyst Kapow Katalyst lets you choose whether to Integrate at the database layer, the application layer, or the presentation layerand you can access all layers in a single integration. The Katalyst Application Integration Platform includes the Design Studio, a complete development environment that provides point-and-click access to any website when building integrations.

40 WEBSITES INTEGRATED IN 5 D AYS

For its ambitious HD.gov project, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) needed to unify information from over 100 NGOs, Federal agencies, and universities. NOAA found it impossible to connect all of these systems into a central sitebefore they turned to Kapow Katalyst. In just 5 days, Katalyst was able to integrate 40 new sites into the HD.gov site.

Figure 2. Katalyst Application Integration Platform

Clusters of Roboservers form our execution engine, which provides linear scalability for integrations and APIs. Finally, our web-based Management Console provides collaborative administration, monitoring, and management of the Katalyst environment.

Kapow Katalyst is the kind of complete application integration platform that modern organizations need. It enables you to integrate any applications you choose and databases you can access. It supports rapid development of integrations, which can be managed with its integrated Management Consoleor with any management tool your IT environment supports. It lets your business create innovative new products and services, and gives IT the confidence to deliver them in record timebringing benefits that range from top-line growth to increased efficiency, improving productivity and profitability.

Kapow Software at Work

Opening a New Market and Enhancing Customer Service One customer, a manufacturer of auto parts, created a new service product by directly accessing their clients applications in real time and extracting their own orders with Kapow Katalyst. They capture tens of thousands of orders annually, increasing market share in a segment they could not address any other way. By providing this valuable service in a way their competitors cannot, they improve their competitive position and make themselves more valuable to their clients. Because each clients applications behave differentlywith different security needs, different navigation, and different screen layouts, the agility that Kapow Katalyst provides is essential to their success. They can create new integrations in a few daysoften lessand implement them with confidence. Application Mobilization of Cloud, SaaS, and On-premise Applications Mobile applications fall completely outside of the realm of standard integration methods, but Kapow Katalyst is widely used to mobilize existing applications without needing to refactor or rewrite them. Our customers deliver results in days or weeksor hours, as IBM and Kapow Software did when we developed a fully functional mobile conference scheduler in 3 hours. In another example Commerzbank, Germanys second-largest bank, created a mobile version of its production B2C web application in 3 monthsincluding the creation of features that targeted mobile users only. Audi uses Kapow Katalyst to deliver real-time data to the dashboard of its new flagship automobile, the A8. All of these organizations rely on Kapow Katalyst to support them with mission-critical performance and reliability.

Agile Application Integration for Improved Productivity Even before cloud computing was popular Katalysts tremendous productivity was delivering rapid timeto-value: Audis product managers used to check each of the 20 [data] sources individually and copy the results into spreadsheets. While the task was time consuming and inconvenient, Audis informationtechnology department didnt want to pay as much as $500,000 to combine all of the data into one application using traditional software-integration techniques. [But with Katalyst] one developer was able to build the new application in just four days for a fraction of that cost.5

Kapow Katalyst: Agile Integration for Any Organization

Kapow Software enables any organization, large or small, to improve its agilitywhether that means radically improving customer service, delivering dramatically reduced costs, or enhancing productivity. Remember that data migration challenge mentioned earlier? The one that required over $40,000 in consulting fees? Katalyst completed that migration in a single weekend. Contact Kapow Software today to learn how we can help you integrate all of your applicationsand datain the cloud or on-premise.

As the leading innovator in cloud application integration, Salesforce AppExchange-certified Kapow Software rapidly integrates, synchronizes, and migrates any data and application inside the enterprise, in the cloud, or on the Internet without dependency on existing APIs. Kapow Software empowers the line of business to streamline business processes and integrate applications, resulting in real-time business value. More than 500 customers, including Audi, Commerzbank, Intel, NetApp, and dozens of federal agencies, rely on Kapow Software for process automation, mobile enablement, cloud and web application integration, content migration, business intelligence, terrorism tracking, and comparison pricing, among other critical solutions.

Kapow Software
260 Sheridan Ave, Suite 420 Palo Alto, CA 94306 Phone: +1 800 805 0828 Email: Sales@kapowsoftware.com Website: www.KapowSoftware.com Blog: www.KapowSoftware.com/blog

The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2007.