Kapow Technologies
July 17, 2009
With the rise of free real time search systems such as Scoopler, Connecta, and ITPints, established players may find themselves in shadows. Most of the industrial strength real time content processing companies like Connotate and Relegence prefer to be out of the spotlight. The reason is that their customers are often publicity shy. When you are monitoring information to make a billion on Wall Street or to snag some bad guys before those folks can create a disruption, you want to be far from the Twitters.
A news release came to me about an outfit called Kapow Technologies. The company described itself this way:
Kapow Technologies provides Fortune 1000 companies with industry-leading technology for accessing, enriching, and serving real-time enterprise and public Web data. The company’s flagship Kapow Web Data Server powers solutions in Web and business intelligence, portal generation, SOA/WOA enablement, and CMS content migration. The visual programming and integrated development environment (IDE) technology enables business and technical decision-makers to create innovative business applications with no coding required. Kapow currently has more than 300 customers, including AT&T, Wells Fargo, Intel, DHL, Vodafone and Audi. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. with additional offices in Denmark, Germany and the U.K
I navigated to the company’s Web site out of curiosity and learned several interesting factoids:
First, the company is a “market leader” in open source intelligence. It has technology to create Web crawling “robots”. The technology can, according to the company, “deliver new Web data sources from inside and outside the agency that can’t be reached with traditional BI and ETL tools.” More information is here. Kapow’s system can perform screen scraping; that is, extracting information from a Web page via software robots.
Second, the company offers what it calls a “portal generation” product. The idea is to build new portals or portlets without coding. The company said:
With Kapow’s technology, IT developers [can]: Avoid the burden of managing different security domains; eliminate the need to code new transaction; and bypass the need to create or access SOA interfaces, event-based bus architectures or proprietary application APIs.
Third, provide a system that handles content migration and transformation. With transformation an expensive line item in the information technology budget, managing these costs becomes more important each month in today’s economic environment. Kapow says here:
The module [shown below] acts much as an ETL tool, but performs the entire data extraction and transformation at the web GUI level. Kapow can load content directly into a destination application or into standard XML files for import by standard content importing tools. Therefore, any content can be migrated and synchronized to and between any web based CMS, CRM, Project Management or ERP system.
Kapow offers connections for a number of widely used content management systems, including Interwoven, Documentum, Vignette, and Oracle Stellent, among others.
Kapow includes a search function along with application programming interfaces, and a range of tools and utilities, including RoboSuite (a block diagram appears below):
Source: http://abss2.fiit.stuba.sk/TeamProject/2006/team05/doc/KapowTech.ppt
The interface for building a view of information about a person of interest looks like this:
Worth a look if you are seeking an industrial strength real time solution. The technology has a wide range of applications in eDiscovery, intelligence, and financial services, among others.
Stephen Arnold, July 17, 2009
Comments
5 Responses to “Kapow Technologies”
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I’ve used this tool on numerous occasions for content migration and transformation and it never ceases to surprise me with it’s capabilities.
Glad you found your way to Kapow Technologies and great write-up! You might also want to check the new Web Data Services blog, where I (and others) are talking about Web Data Services (the emerging market we see ourselves as part of) in greater detail. http://kapowtech.com/blog/ As you allude to, we are lucky to have a great roster of clients, but frankly, there is still a huge effort in educating companies on what Web Data Services is and how valuable it really could be to them. Almost all enterprise relevant content today is available on the Web, but many companies are still spending hours of re-coding and hundreds if not thousands of unnecessary dollars on projects aimed at fully leveraging that content, whether that be for biz intelligence, content migration, etc.
If you’re up for it, I’d love to have one of my reps give you a demo some time so you can see our Web Data Server in action. Shoot me an e-mail any time at stefan.andreasen@kapowtech.com if you’re interested.
Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO, Kapow Technologies
Kapow makes it very hard to try their technology – not sure how to even get it. It also seems almost impossible to find out how much it costs. Does this mean it costs an arm and a leg? I would guess so. I also cannot find out how to contact someone at this company…. Is this the service I should expect?
can we assume that unless you are a multi-million dollar organization that Kapow are not interested in conducting any business? It would be good if this was stated in the web site so we knew not to waste our time….
Peter,
Never assume. It makes an ass of u and me.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2010