The Web Data Services Blog

Boris Evelson wrote and interesting  blog, “How Do We Define a BI Vendor”, on the Information Management site. It’s a great summary of the features that characterize a BI vendor (or product), but IMHO it’s missing the most vital characteristic of the all, data access to the right data.

BI analytics is useless without the right data.  No advanced BI feature can compensate for not having access to the most relevant and timely data.

Unfortunately for business analysts, a growing volume of relevant BI data is locked in Web sites beyond the reach of any standard data access method available in BI products on the market today.

Fortunately there is a solution; it’s called Web Data Services, a convenient, economical way to access data through an existing Web presentation layer (the same interface used by normal Web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari). Web Data Services can both consolidate Web data into a standard database or wrap it into standard Web services, both of which can then be easily consumed by any BI product on the market.

Suddenly business analysts can access all the data they know from their application interfaces directly in the BI tools.

Jim Ericson recently wrote a nice article ( Net Expectations -What a Web data service economy implies for business ) about the value of Web Data Services in which he digs in to all the aspects of using the Web as a new way to get data that’s faster and more cost-effective.

The article includes this quote by longtime BI analyst Howard Dresner:

“The nice thing about Web data services… is that it’s easy, it’s relatively inexpensive to create or consume and it’s immediate. Business doesn’t want to wait until next quarter, and IT is gravitating this way too because they have only so much budget and so many people.”

What a powerful statement. With Web Data Services, it suddenly becomes easy, inexpensive and immediate to obtain data access, something I am sure many IT departments will praise while they struggle to deliver the necessary data in-time and within-budget to their increasingly data-hungry Lines of Business.

What is unique about the Kapow Web Data Server is that it can get you the data even when no APIs exist by leveraging the Web presentation layer interface that always exists on the Web.

Even if there is an API, the no coding robotic approach by Kapow Technologies is typically a lot faster and  an easier way to access the data.

Think about it. If I am a business analyst and need Salesforce.com data in my BI dashboard, I really don’t want to learn about Salesforce APIs and program lines of code. I’d much rather just point at the data with my mouse in the Kapow RoboMaker Visual IDE, and get data access directly the way I am used to. Here at Kapow Technologies we have dozens of these “robots” integrating SalesForce with Marketo (our marketing automation tool), our Emails in Microsoft Exchange, Jigsaw, our customer bug tracking system, our ERP systems, and so on… and we would never dream about using the APIs.

To make my final point, go back to Jim Ericson’s article to learn more about how Fiserv uses the Kapow Web Data Server to integrate with 300 banks in 10 countries, all with no coding. It’s an impressive real-life story about the value of Web Data Services.

As always, please send me your comments, my email is SA at kapowtech dot com

By:  Stefan Andreasen

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at Corda’s Visual Evolution User Conference. Corda’s CenterView product delivers a powerful Business Intelligence dashboard solution to improve performance management, while even allowing dashboard access from mobile devices such as your iPhone.

Corda CEO Neal Williams presented a 9 step KPI (Key Performance Indicator) process to identify driver and outcome metrics that matter most for creating successful Business Intelligence processes.  Interestingly, Neal explained that the selection of data sources is often the most flawed part of the process because most business analysts take a bottoms-up approach by choosing easy-to-get-to data sources which lead to suboptimal business decisions. Neal stressed the importance of taking a top-down approach, including a very careful analysis and selection process to determine which data sources create the most accurate and timely results.

It became very clear that our product can go a long way in ensuring business analysts get the best, freshest and most valuable data for their BI dashboard.  During my presentation, one person commented, “I asked my IT department for some critical data, data that I can easily access in my web browser, but the response was it could take 6-12 months to get the data”. With Kapow Web Data Server it would have taken at most, a few hours.

As an example, I encourage you to read the article, “Hyper Management of working capital:  Technology suport the work of corporate treasury“, which describes how FiServ uses Kapow robots to access complex, hard-to-get-to data sources residing at more than 300 banks spread over 10 countries. FiServ struggled with this problem for years with no other alternative than error-prone, manual cut-and-paste. Now successfully in production as a joint solution of Corda and Kapow Technologies, Fiserv is a great example how Kapow Web Data Server can help business analysts settle for nothing less than the best, most timely data sources.

Enjoy reading.

By:  Stefan Andreasen