Kapow's Browser Based Data Integration, No APIs Required

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Nov 17, 2010 Comments

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Most of you know Kapow Software (news, site) as a provider of data integration and content migration solutions. And that's exactly what they do. But yesterday the vendor announced a new version of their data integration platform. One they say will change the way to you think about content integration. One that could make your next project a lot easier.

There's a Connector for That

Rarely do we only work with one product or solution. We have our information tied up in any number of systems and often we try to pull this information together to make our lives a little easier. To do that, we need connectors, content connectors, and just about every vendor that speaks to data, or content, integration has more than a few in their back pocket. Want to connect to SharePoint? There's a connector for that. Open Text? There's a connector for that. Alfresco, well darn if there isn't a connector for that as well.

In fact, there is typically more than one connector for most of the popular Enterprise CMS, Web CMS, Enterprise 2.0 system and the multitude of business applications available. It just depends on who you ask (and let's not even get into the CMIS discussion).

But what if you want to integrate data from a system for which there is no connector, no API? And you don't have the time to build one (because we all know how long building one can take and we need to integrate that data now). Well…

There's a Browser for That

Kapow Software (notice the new brand), has announced a new way to do data integration that they say is the future of data integration. And you don't need an API to do it. At the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, in Los Angeles, the Kapow Katalyst 8.0 was unveiled. You would probably know Katalyst best as the Kapow Web Data Server, last updated this past May.

As the new name likely implies, this isn't a simple update. Kapow Katalyst offers an agile approach to integration, one that requires no APIs. At the core of the solution is the Kapow Extraction Browser. This browser enables you to extract data automatically from any application that is available as a web application. You can extract data from any layer: database, application logic or presentation tier, transform it, integrate it and/or migrate it.

Once the data is extracted, it can then be delivered as an API or web service, into a database or other system via the front end.

Of course if you do have APIs and you want to use them, Katalyst 8.0 does support integration using them as well.

Kapow Software's Katalyst 8.0

The Management Console

The Management Console is the underlying web management console that will allow you to manage and collaborate across the organization on all your data integration projects. Through it, you can monitor all your environments, manage the robots built to extract and transform your data, manage your users and permissions, schedule processes and more.

The Design Studio

The Design Studio is the latest version of Robomaker (which we profiled in the Kapow Content Migration article). This is a completely revamped design studio that will let you set up your robots. There is a browser view that lets you see the HTML or XML sources and there's the Robot flow view where you can create Robots using Kapow's visual scripting application.