The Web Data Services Blog

“Information, thanks to the internet, is growing at breakneck, exponential speeds. This has proven to be both an opportunity and a curse for businesses. With all this data abundance, organizations of all sizes struggle to access and act upon it in a timely and cost effective way. Just think about the impact to your business if you could automatically add high-value Web data to your market intelligence, pricing intelligence, financial intelligence or any other business intelligence application. Until recently, this seemed like an impossible feat, or at least cost prohibitive based on the man hours involved.”

The above is an outtake of an article I recently wrote for ebizQ, the full article is available here and provides more insight into the emerging web data services market, common web data access challenges and real world use cases and benefits of web data services. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

Web Data – Why Top Business Leaders Depend On It And You Should To

By:  Ron Yu

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

Earlier this week we announced great results for Q2 FY2010.  See the highlights.  At Kapow, we see the voracious appetite of businesses to harness the power of the internet by leveraging real-time web data into their core enterprise information systems.

I met up with Joe Bugajski, analyst at The Burton Group, this morning and he conveyed that making sense out of the world of “unstructured” data remains unsolved.  Also that information managers continue to face challenges combining “external” data with the data they work with every day.

Web Data Services certainly fills that void.  With over 400 customers and Fortune 1000 companies across every industry and geography, forward thinking executives are finding ways to use public Web data to keep an eye on competition, reduce risk, automate manual processes and even roll out new products and services.   Stay tuned for our webinar with Deutsche Boerse, Europe’s #2 stock exchange, to see for yourself how real-time web data services was put into action to create a power financial instrument for energy commodities traders to time the market!

By:  Ron Yu

At Kapow Technologies we launched our first SaaS product Kapow OnDemand about a year ago and today we have many great companies running it for pricing intelligence, web portals, mobile enablement and more. During the same period we also had an increasing amount of people using either our non-commercial community, openkapow, or a free trial of Kapow OnDemand. Many came back and said “I love this product, it’s exactly what I’m looking for, but my project and budget is not big enough for my own hosted solution like Kapow OnDemand.  Do you have a multi-tenant pay-as-you-go SaaS offering instead?”

As always, we strive to deliver products our customers want, so we looked around for the ideal partner to launch such a product.

Today I am very proud to announce we are launching Kapow Web Data Services 7.0.0, a new pay-as-you-go SaaS service together with StrikeIron.  The new offering is based on a true SaaS multi-tenant implementation of our well proven and robust Kapow OnDemand hosted solution.

Say “goodbye” to cutting and pasting from your web browser into Microsoft Excel. Now you can wrap any website or web application into RSS feeds or REST web services for rapid, automated and structured access of any external web data source. Deliver that feed or service to your choice of application, Business Intelligence tool or RSS feed reader. With the StrikeIron Live Data for Excel you can even get real-time access to Web Data from Microsoft Excel.

Bob Brauer, Founder and President of StrikeIron, wrote a nice blog post on the announcement.
We are excited about our partnership with Bob’s company, and StrikeIron has some great complementary data services.  And now together with Kapow Technologies they have the most complete SaaS based Data Services offering on the market.

Check out our free trial of Kapow Web Data Services 7.0.0 over on StrikeIron and let us know what you think.

By:  Stefan Andreasen

We received very nice coverage by Dana Gardner in his blog post “Web data gains some due respect as Kapow eases it into mission critical enterprise uses” at ZDNet.com.  Dana details the essential role web-based content plays in business intelligence (BI) and service-oriented and web-oriented applications (SOA/WOA), and also highlights the need for fast and easy integration of the data.  Great article, Dana!

By:  Stefan Andreasen