04/22/2008

Kapow Technologies introduced Kapow OnDemand, giving companies the ability to quickly create enterprise mashup applications that provide structured “web intelligence”.

ebizQ received the following:

Kapow OnDemand is based on the Kapow Mashup Server which is deployed at more than 300 companies across the globe including Audi and Simply Hired. While there are a lot of different tools available today that visually compose mashup elements, Kapow OnDemand is the only enterprise-class solution on the market that provides access to the underlying data sources and services to be mashed up. In addition to Excel spreadsheets, companies can also import web data into existing applications and IT infrastructure via XML.

"Obtaining access to data, converting unstructured data formats and IT governance are among the top issues hampering enterprise mashup deployments today," said Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner at advisory firm ZapThink. "Kapow OnDemand removes these barriers. Business analysts now have the ability to create automated robots that collect and integrate Web data directly into Excel, which is one of the most pervasive desktop environments in use today. Meanwhile, IT departments have a solution that gives them more control and choice in their level of involvement with mashup and Web intelligence projects. It’s the best of both worlds."

Introducing the Kapow Connector for Excel®

In conjunction with today’s Kapow OnDemand announcement, the company unveiled Kapow Connector for Excel, which greatly improves the productivity of today’s knowledge workers. When used in combination with Kapow OnDemand or the Kapow Mashup Server Web 2.0 Edition, Excel users can find and execute web services that deliver a wealth of data directly to their spreadsheet.

Compared to traditional cut-and-paste methods of formatting web based data, the Kapow Connector for Excel opens up new possibilities for spreadsheet-based applications. It is now feasible to collect and analyze web intelligence in real-time at the user’s desktop – and on an unprecedented scale. Analysts can rapidly collect massive amounts of market data related to competitive pricing, product mix analysis, or financial metrics, with the ability to act quickly on the data to take advantage of market opportunities.

“Before Kapow OnDemand, a competitive intelligence mashup of a dozen external data feeds would have taken several days or longer,” said Stefan Andreasen, CTO of Kapow Technologies. “Now, we can complete this project in as little as 30 minutes, allowing business analysts to spend valuable time on innovation. In addition, IT departments benefit greatly from a rapidly deployed hosted service that gives them flexible deployment and minimized infrastructure management requirements.”

Components of Kapow OnDemand

The OnDemand Service is a complete solution, deployed on a commercial-grade grid computing environment that utilizes a level of security, reliability, and scalability typically found only in enterprise data centers. Kapow OnDemand users can take comfort in the knowledge that they are using a highly secure service that incorporates the latest technology for load balancing, high availability, failover, and automated backup and restore.

Kapow OnDemand includes a Robot Designer to construct custom web harvesting feeds and services in a flexible role-based execution runtime. Additionally, a full set of tools is provided that allows monitoring and managing a portfolio of services and feeds to provide Kapow OnDemand site administrators with complete control and insight into their OnDemand environment.

Every user of Kapow OnDemand has access to an intuitive-to-use -- but very powerful -- visual scripting environment for building the services and feeds that automates the harvesting and delivery of web intelligence to the desktop or application of choice. With minimal training, web-savvy, non-technical users will be able to build robots in a matter of minutes that extract, transform, and output web data to Excel spreadsheets or a database.