Part 2 of 4: Web Data Services Provide Ease of Data Access and Distribution from Variety of Sources, Destinations

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, one of a series on web data services, with Kapow Technologies, with a focus on information management for business intelligence.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how to make the most of web data services for business intelligence (BI). As enterprises seek to gain better insights into their markets, processes, and business development opportunities, they face a daunting challenge -- how to identify, gather, cleanse, and manage all of the relevant data and content being generated across the Web.

In Part 1 of our series we discussed how external data has grown in both volume and importance across internal Internet, social networks, portals, and applications in recent years. As the recession forces the need to identify and evaluate new revenue sources, businesses need to capture such web data services for their BI to work better and fuller.

Enterprises need to know what's going on and what's being said about their markets across those markets. They need to share those web data service inferences quickly and easily across their internal users. The more relevant and useful content that enters into BI tools, the more powerful the BI outcomes -- especially as we look outside the enterprise for fast shifting trends and business opportunities.

In this podcast, Part 2 of the series with Kapow Technologies, we identify how BI and web data services come together, and explore such additional subjects as text analytics and cloud computing.

So, how to get started and how to affordably bring web data services to BI and business consumers as intelligence and insights? Here to help us explain the benefits of web data services and BI, is Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Jim Kobielus: Hi, Dana. Hello, everybody,

Gardner: We're also joined by Stefan Andreasen, co-founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. Welcome, Stefan.

Stefan Andreasen: Thank you, Dana. I'm glad to be here.

Gardner: Jim, let's start with you. Let's take a look at what's going on in the wider BI field. Is it true that the more content you bring into BI the better, or are there trade-offs, and how do we manage those tradeoffs?

The more the better

Kobielus: It's true that the more relevant content you bring into your analytic environment the better, in terms of having a single view or access in a unified fashion to all the information that might be relevant to any possible decision you might make within any business area. But, clearly, there are lots of caveats, "gotchas," and trade-offs there.

One of these is that it becomes very expensive to discover, to capture, and to do all the relevant transformation, cleansing, storage, and delivery of all of that content. Obviously, from the point of view of laying in bandwidth, buying servers, and implementing storage, it becomes very expensive, especially as you bring more unstructured information from your content management system (CMS) or various applications from desktops and from social networks.

So, the more information of various sorts that you bring into your BI or analytic environment, it becomes more expensive from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. It also becomes a real burden from the point of view of the end user, a consumer of this information. They are swamped. There's all manner of information.

If you don't implement your BI environment, your advanced analytic environment, or applications in a way that helps them to be more productive, they're just going to be swamped. They're not going to know what to do with it -- what's relevant or not relevant, what's the master reference, what's the golden record versus what's just pure noise.

So, there is that whole cost on productivity, if you don't bring together all these disparate sources in a unified way, and then package them up and deliver them in a way that feeds directly into decision processes throughout your organization, whether HR, finance, or the like.

Gardner: So, as we look outside the organization to gain insights into what market challenges organizations face and how they need to shift and track customer preferences, we need to be mindful that the fire hose can't just be turned on. We need to bring in some tools and technologies to help us get the right information and put it in a format that's consumable.

Kobielus: Yes, filter the fire hose. Filtering the fire hose is where this topic of web data services for BI comes in. Web data services describes that end-to-end analytic information pipe-lining process. It's really a fire hose that you filter at various points, so that the end users turn on their tap and they're not blown away by a massive stream. Rather, it's a stream of liquid intelligence that is palatable and consumable.

Gardner: Stefan, from your perspective in working with customers, how wide and deep do they want to go when they look to web data services? What are we actually talking about in terms of the type of content?

Andreasen: Referring back to your original question, where you talk about whether we need more content, and whether that improves the analysis and results that analysts are getting, it's all about, as Jim also mentioned, the relevance and timeliness of the data.

There is a fire hose of data out there, but some of that data is flowing easily, but some of it might only be dripping and some might be inaccessible at all. Maybe I should explain the concept.

Think about it this way. The relevant data for your BI applications is located in various places. One is in your internal business applications. Another is your software-as-a-service (SaaS) business application, like Salesforce, etc. Others are at your business partners, your retailers, or your suppliers. Another one is at government. The last one is on the World Wide Web in those tens of millions of applications and data sources. There is very often some relevant information there.

Accessible via browser

Today, all of this data that I just described is more or less accessible in a web browser. Web data services allow you to access all these data sources, using the interface that the web browser is already using. It delivers that result in a real-time, relative, and relevant way into SQL databases, directly into BI tools, or to even service enabled and encapsulated data. It delivers the benefits that IT can now better serve the analysts need for new data, which is almost always the case.

BI projects happen in two ways. One is that you make a completely new BI. You get a completely new BI system, and then make brand-new reports, and new data sources. That's the typical BI project.

What's even more important is that incremental daily improvement of existing reports. Analysts sit there, they find some new data source, they have their report, and they say, "It would be really good, if I could add this column of data to my report, maybe replace this data, or if I could get this amount of data in real-time rather than just once a week." So it's those kinds of improvements that web data services also really can help with.

Gardner: Jim Kobielus, it sounds like we've got two nice opportunities here. One is the investments that have already been made in BI internally, largely for structured data. Now, we have this need to look externally and to look at the newer formats internally around web content and browser-based content. We need to pull these together.

Kobielus: There are a lot of trends. One of them is, of course, self-service mashups by end users of their own reports, their own dashboards, and their own views of data from various sources, as well as their data warehouses, data marts, OLAP cubes and the like.

But, another one gets to what you're asking about, Dana, in terms of trends in BI. At Forrester, we see traditional BI as a basic analytics environment, with ad-hoc query, OLAP, and the like. That's traditional BI -- it's the core of pretty much every enterprise's environment.

Advanced analytics, building on that initial investment and getting to this notion of an incremental add-on environment is really where a lot of established BI users are going. Advanced analytics means building on those core reporting, querying, and those other features with such tools as data mining and text analytics, but also complex event processing (CEP) with a front-end interactive visualization layer that often enables mashups of their own views by the end users.

When we talk about advanced analytics, that gets to this notion of converging structured and unstructured information in a more unified way. Then, that all builds on your core BI investment -- smashing the silos between data mining and text mining that many organizations have implemented for good reasons. These are separate projects, probably separate users, separate sources, separate tools, and separate vendors.

We see a strong push in the industry towards smashing those silos and bringing them all together. A big driver of that trend is that users, the enterprises, are demanding unified access to market intelligence and customer intelligence that's bubbling up from this massive Web 2.0 infrastructure, social networks, blogs, Twitter and the like.

Relevant to ongoing activities

That's very monetizable and very useful content to them in determining customer sentiment, in determining a lot of things that are relevant to their ongoing sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

Gardner: So, we're not only trying to bring the best of traditional BI with this large pool of valuable information from web data services. We're also trying to extend the benefits of BI beyond just the people who can write a good SQL query, the proverbial folks in the white lab coats behind the glass windows. We're trying to bring those BI analytics out to a much larger class of people in the organization.

Kobielus: Exactly. SQL queries are the core of traditional BI and data warehousing in terms of the core access language. Increasingly, in the whole advanced analytics space, SQL is becoming just one of many access techniques.

One might, in some ways, describe the overall trend as toward more service-oriented architecture (SOA), oriented access of disparate sources through the same standard interfaces that are used everywhere else for SOA applications. In other words, WS/XML, WSDL, SOAP, and much more.

So, SOA is coming to advanced analytics, or is already there. SOA, in the analytics environment, is enabled through a capability that many data federation vendors provide. It's called a "semantic virtualization layer." Basically, it's an on-demand, unified roll up of disparate sources.

Increasingly, in the whole advanced analytics space, SQL is becoming just one of many access techniques.

It transforms them all to a common set of schemas and objects, which are then wrapped in SOA interfaces and presented to the developer as a unified API or service contract for accessing all this disparate data. SOA really is the new SQL for this new environment.

Gardner: Stefan, what is holding back organizations from being able to bring more of this real-time, highly actionable information vis-à-vis web services? What's preventing them from bringing this into use with their BI and analytics activity?

Andreasen: First, let me comment on what Jim said, and then try to answer your question. Jim's comment about SOA as common to BI is really spot on.

The world is more diverse

Traditionally, for BI, we've been trying to gather all the data into one unified, centralized repository, and accessing the data from there. But, the world is getting more diverse and the data is spread in more and different silos. What companies realize today is that we need to get service-level access to the data, where they reside, rather than trying to assemble them all.

So, tomorrow's data stores of BI, and today's as well -- and I'll give you an example -- is really a combination of accessing data in your central data repositories and then accessing them where they reside. Let me just explain that by an example.

One Fortune 500 financial services company spent three years trying to build a BI application that would access data from their business partners. The business partners are big banks spread all over the U.S. The effort failed, but they had to solve this problem, because it was a legal and regulatory necessity for them.

So, they had to do it with brute force. Basically, they had analysts logging into their business partners' web sites and business applications, and copying and pasting those data into Excel to deliver those reports.

Finally, we got in contact with them, and we solved that problem. Web data services can encapsulate or wrap the data silos that were residing with their business partners into services -- SOAP services, REST services, etc. -- and thereby get automated access to the data directly into the BI tool. So, the problem they tried to solve for three years could now be solved with data services, and is running really successfully in production today.

This is also where web data services technology comes into play. Who knows best what data they want? It's the analysts, right? But who delivers the data? It's the IT department.

Kobielus: Dana, before we go to the next question, I want to extend what Stefan said, because that's very important to understand this whole space. This new paradigm, where SOA is already here in advanced analytics, is enabled by mashup. I published a report recently called Mighty Mashups that talks about this trend.

You need two core things in your infrastructure to make this happen. One is data mashups. In the back end, in the infrastructure, you need to have orchestrated integration, transformations, consolidation, and joining among disparate data sets. Then, you expose those composite data objects as services through SOA.

Then, in the front end, you need to enable end users to have access to these composite data objects through a registry, or whatever you call it, that's integrated into the environments where the user actually does work, whether it's their browsers/portal, Excel, or Microsoft Office environment. So, it's the presentation mashup on the user front end, and data mashup -- a.k.a. composite data objects -- on the back end to make this vision a reality.

Gardner: So, what's been holding back this ability to use a variety of different data types, content types, and data services in relation to BI has been proprietary formats, high cost and complexity, laborious manual processes, perhaps even spreadsheets, and a little older way of presenting information. Is that fair, Stefan?

Andreasen: I think so, yes. This is also where web data services technology comes into play. Who knows best what data they want? It's the analysts, right? But who delivers the data? It's the IT department.

Tools are lacking

Today, the IT department often lacks tools to deliver those custom feeds that the line of business is asking for. But, with web data services, you can actually deliver these feeds. The data that IT is asking for is almost always data they already know, see, and work with in the business applications, with the business partners, etc. They work with the data. They see them in the browsers, but they cannot get the custom feeds. With the web data services product, IT can deliver those custom feeds in a very short time.

Let me use an example here again. This is a real story. Suppose I am the CEO of one of the largest network equipment manufacturers in the world. I am running a really complex business, where I need to understand the sales figures and the distribution model. I possibly have hundreds of different systems and variables I need to look at to run my business.

Another fact is I am busy. I travel a lot. I'm often in the airport or where I don't have access to my systems. When I finally get access, I have to open my laptop, get on the 'Net’, and pull out my report.

What we did here was we took our product, service enabled the relevant reports, built a Blackberry front end to that, and delivered that in three hours, from start to end. So, suddenly, in a very agile fashion, the CEO could reach his target and look at his data anywhere he had wireless access.

Gardner: It must be very frustrating for these analysts, business managers, and business development people to be able to see content and data out on the web through their browser, but not be able to get it into context with their internal BI systems, and get those dashboards and views that allow a much fuller appreciation of what's really going on.

So, breaking down this barrier and giving them the key to the house, or actually giving IT a way to deliver the key to the house, is critical for the agility of BI going forward.

Andreasen: It's almost absurd. Think about it. I'm an analyst and I work with the data. I feel I own the data. I type the data in. Then, when I need it in my report, I cannot get it there. It's like owning the house, but not having the key to the house. So, breaking down this barrier and giving them the key to the house, or actually giving IT a way to deliver the key to the house, is critical for the agility of BI going forward.

Kobielus: I agree. Here's an important point I want to make as well. The key to making this all happen, making this mashup vision of reality in the final analysis, is expanding the flexibility of your data or source discovery capabilities within the infrastructure.

Most organizations that have a BI environment have one or more data warehouses aggregating and storing the data and they've got pre-configured connections and loading of data from specific sources into those data warehouses. Most users who are looking at reports in their BI environment are looking only at data that's pre-connected, pre-integrated, pre-processed by their IT department.

The user feels frustration, because they go on the Web and into Google and can see the whole universe of information that's out there. So, for a mashup vision to be reality, organizations have got to go the next step.

Much broader range

It's good to have these pre-configured connections through extract, transform and load (ETL) and the like into their data warehouse from various sources. But, there should also be ideally feeds in from various data aggregators. There are many commercial data aggregators out there who can provide discovery of a much broader range of data types -- financial, regulatory, and what not.

Also, within this ideal environment there should be user-driven source discovery through search, through pub-sub, and a variety of means. If all these source-discovery capabilities are provided in a unified environment with common tooling and interfaces, and are all feeding information and allowing users to dynamically update the information sets available to them in real-time, then that's the nirvana.

That means your analytic environment is continuously refreshed with information that's most relevant to end users and the decisions they are making now.

Gardner: So, we've identified the problem, and that's bringing the best of web services and web data into the best of what BI does and then expanding the purview of that beyond the white lab coats crowd, into the people who can take action on it. That's great. But, with the fire hose, we can't just start allowing this access to these data services without what the IT department considers critical. That is to keep the cost down, because we're still in recession and the budgets are tight.

We also need to have governance. We need to have manageability. We need to make the IT people feel like they can be responsible in opening up this filtered fire hose. So how do we do that, Stefan? How do we move from pure web static to an enterprise-caliber web data services?

The way our product works is that it allows you to instruct our system how to interact with a web application, just the same way as the line of business user.

Andreasen: Thank you for mentioning that. Jim, to get back to you on mashups, that's really relevant. Let's just look at the realities in IT departments today. They're probably understaffed. They've probably got budget cuts, but they have more demand from lines of business, and they probably also have more systems they have to maintain. So, they're being pushed from all sides.

What's really necessary here is a new way of solving this problem. This is where Kapow and web data services come in, as a disruptive new way of solving a problem of delivering the data -- the real-time relevant data that the analyst needs.

The way it works is that, when you work with the data in a browser, you see it visually, you click on it, and you navigate tables and so on. The way our product works is that it allows you to instruct our system how to interact with a web application, just the same way as the line of business user.

This means that you access and work with the data in the world in which the end users see the data. It's all with no coding. It's all visual, all point and click. Any IT person can, with our product, turn data that you see in a browser into a real feed, a custom feed, virtually in minutes or in a few hours for something that would typically take days, weeks, or months -- or may even be impossible.

Hand in hand

So a mashup is really an agile business application, a situational application. How can you make situational BI without agile data, without situational data? They basically go hand in hand. For mashups to deliver on the promise, you really need a way to deliver the data feeds in a very agile fashion.

Gardner: But what about governance and security?

Andreasen: Web data services access the data in the way you do from a web browser. All data resides in a database somewhere -- inside your firewall, at a customer, at a partner, or somewhere. That database is very secure. There's no way to access the database, without going through tedious processes and procedures to open a hole in that firewall.

The beauty with web data services is that it's really accessing the data through the application front end, using credentials and encryptions that are already in place and approved. You're using the existing security mechanism to access the data, rather than opening up new security holes, with all the risk that that includes.

Gardner: Jim, from some of the reports that you've done recently, what are customers, the enterprise customers, telling you about what they need in terms of better access to web data services, but also mindful about the requirements of IT around security and governability and so forth?

Kobielus: Right, right. The core theme I'm hearing is that mashups, user self-service development, and maintenance of user disparate data are very, very important, for lots of reasons. One, of course, is speeding delivery of analytics and allowing users to personalize it, and so forth. But, mashups without IT control is essentially chaos. And, mashups without governance is an invitation to chaos.

. . . users should be able to mashup and create their own reports and dashboards, but, from the perspective of the companies that employ them, they should only be able to mashup from company-sanctioned sources . . .

What does governance mean in this environment? Well, it means that users should be able to mashup and create their own reports and dashboards, but, from the perspective of the companies that employ them, they should only be able to mashup from company-sanctioned sources, such as data warehouses data marts, and external sources.

They should be able to only mashup that data, tables, records, or fields that they have authorized access to. They should only be able to mashup within the bounds of particular templates, reports, and dashboards that are sanctioned by the company and maintained by IT. There should be ongoing monitoring of access, utilization, and refreshes.

Then, users should be able to share their mashups with other users to create ever more composite mashups, but they should only be able to share data analytics that the recipient has authorized access to.

Now, this sounds like fascism, but it really isn't, because in practice what goes on is that users are usually given a long leash in a mashup environment to be able to pull in external data, when need be, with IT being able to monitor the utilization or the access of that data.

Fundamentally, governance comes down to the fact that all the applications are stored within a metadata environment -- repositories, and so forth -- that are under management by IT. So, that's the final piece in the mashup governance equation.

Gardner: I think I'm hearing you say that you really should have an intermediary between all of that web data and your BI analytics and the people making the decisions, not only for those technical reasons, but also to vet the quality of the data.

It’s in IT’s interest

Kobielus: Exactly. This is in IT's interest, and they know that. IT wants to insource as much of the development and maintenance of reports and dashboards and the like as they can get away with, which means it's pushed down to the end user to do the maintenance themselves on their own views.

IT is more than happy to go toward mashup, if there is the ability for them to keep their eyes and ears open, to set the boundaries of the sandbox, and insource to end users.

Gardner: Stefan, I want to go back to you, if I could. We talked about how to bring this into IT, but we also need to bring in to this the role of the developer, because we're just not talking about integration, we're also talking about presentation.

Does what Kapow brings to the table also allow those developers to get a task about trying to expose web data services within the context of applications, views, different audit presentation, dashboards, and what not? What's the role of the developer in this?

Andreasen: That's very important. We talked about this fire hose before. When I see a fire hose in front of me, I imagine the analyst can now open this fire hose and all the data in the world just splashing in their face, and that's really not the case. web data services allows the developer to incite the IT department to much more quickly develop and deliver those custom feeds or those custom web services that the analysts need in the BI tools.

Also, on governance, the reality is that the data that has value is data that comes from business partners, from government, or from sources where you have a business relationship, and therefore can govern it.

Also, on governance, the reality is that the data that has value is data that comes from business partners, from government, or from sources where you have a business relationship, and therefore can govern it. But, for various reasons, you cannot rewrite those applications, you cannot access those SQL databases in a traditional way. web data services is a way to access data from trusted sources, but access them in a much more agile way.

Gardner: Those services are coming across in a standardized format that developers can work with using existing tools.

Andreasen: Yes, that's very important. Web data services deliver the data into your standard data warehouse, into your standard SQL databases. Or, as I said earlier, it can wrap those applications into SOAP services, REST services, RSS feeds, and even .NET and Java API, so you get the API or you get the data access exactly the way you need it in your BI tool, in your data mining environment, etc.

Gardner: We've established the need. We've looked at the value of increasing BI's purview. We've looked at the larger trends around SOA and bringing lots of different data types into an architecture that can then be leveraged for BI and analytics. We've looked at the need for extending this to business processes outside the organization, as well as data types inside. We've looked at the role of the developer.

Are there examples, Stefan, of people who are actually doing this, who have been early adopters, who have taken the step of recognizing an intermediary and the tool and platform set to manage web data services in the context of BI? And, if they've done that, what are the paybacks, what are the metrics of success?

Andreasen: One of our early adopters is Audi. They've been using our product for five years. What was important for them was that, traditionally, it could take three to six months for them to get access to some data. But, with the Kapow Web Data Server, they were able to access data and create these custom feeds in a much shorter fashion, days rather than months.

What the business needs

They have been using it successfully for five years. They are growing with it, they're getting a lot of benefit around it, and couldn't imagine running the IT department without web data services today, because it gives them the way to deliver this agile custom data feeds that the business needs.

Gardner: Jim Kobielus, looking to the future, it seems to me that there is going to be more types of data coming from external sources. Perhaps, more of the internal data that companies have used in traditional applications -- BI and integration -- might find itself being housed in server farms, otherwise known as clouds, either on-premises, on some third-party grid or utility fabric, or some hybrid of the two.

When we factor in the movement and expected direction of cloud computing, how does that then bear down on the requirements for managed, governed, and IT-caliber, mission-critical caliber web data service tools?

Kobielus: It simplifies it and complicates it. It simplifies to some degree or enables this vision of self-service BI mashup, with automated source discovery, to come to fruition. You need a lot of compute power, you need a lot of data storage to do things like high volume, real-time text analytics.

A lot of that is going to have to be outsourced to public clouds that are scalable. They can scale out petabytes worth of data or can scale out some massive server farms to do semantic analysis and transformations and the like. So, the storage and the processing for most visions have to be outsourced to cloud providers. To some degree it makes it possible to realize this vision on the back end, at the web data services and data mashup side.

Public clouds are essentially silos from each other . . . They don't necessarily interoperate out of the box with your existing premises data environment, if you're an enterprise.

It also complicates it, because now you're introducing more silos. Public clouds are essentially silos from each other. There is Amazon, and there is the Windows SQL data or Azure, Then, of course, there is Google and a variety of others that are providing clouds that don't interoperate well, or at all, with each other. They don't necessarily interoperate out of the box with your existing premises data environment, if you're an enterprise.

So, the governance of all these disparate functions, the coordination of security, and the encryption and so forth across all these environments, as well as the coordination of the data archiving and auditing need to be worked out by each organization that goes this route with a disparate and motley assortment of internal and external platforms that are managing various functions within this analytic cloud.

In other words, it could complicate this whole equation considerably, unless you have one predominant public cloud partner that can do all the data integration, all the cleansing, all the transforms, all the warehousing in their cloud, and can provide you also with this SOA abstraction layer, the semantic virtualization layer, and can also ideally host your advanced analytics applications, like your data mining, in that environment.

It can do it all for you in a very streamlined way, with a common governance, security administration, and data modeling toolset. Remember, end users are a big part of this equation here. The end users can then pick up these cloud-based tools to mash up data within this unified cloud and mash it up in a way that makes sense to end users, not the professional black belt data modelers.

That vision cannot be realized right now with the commercial cloud offerings in the analytic market. I think it will take about two to three to five years for the cloud providers to go this route. It's not there yet.

Gardner: We're about out of time. I want to take the same question to Stefan about the cloud computing angle and the mixed sourcing for applications, datasets, and business processes. It seems to me this would be an opportunity for Kapow.

No master hub

Andreasen: Absolutely. What I don't see is one big vendor that solves all your data needs and becomes like the master hub for all information and data on the Web. History has shown that the way that companies compete with each other is to differentiate themselves.

If everybody was using the same provider and the same kind of data, they couldn't differentiate. This is really, I think, what companies realize today -- unless we do something different and better, than our competitors, we are not going to win this game.

What's important with web data services is hosting the tools and the facilities to access the data, but allowing the customers to create in a self-service fashion the custom data feeds they need. Our product fits perfectly into that world as well. We already have many of our customers using out product in the cloud. We become a tool where they can create ad hoc, on demand, or as necessary data feeds, and to share them with anybody else that needs them.

Kobielus: I've got one more point. In this ecosystem that's emerging, there's a strong role for providers of tooling specifically focused on self-service mashup and also for what's often called on-demand analytical sandboxing, which could be used by end users to create their own analytic workspace, and pull information.

What's important with web data services is hosting the tools and the facilities to access the data, but allowing the customers to create in a self-service fashion the custom data feeds they need.

Those that can provide the tooling that works in front of whatever the organization's preferred data management or data federation or data warehousing or BI vendor might be. So there's a plenty of opportunity for the likes of Kapow, and many others in this space too, for complementary solutions that are integrated with any of the leading data federation and cloud analytic solutions that are out there.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been discussing the requirements around bringing web data services into BI, but doing so in a mission-critical fashion that's amenable to the IT department.

I want to thank our guests. We've been joined by Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks, Jim.

Kobielus: Sure, no problem.

Gardner: We've also been joined by Stefan Andreasen. He's the co-founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. Thank you so much, Stefan.

Andreasen: Thank you everyone for a great discussion.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. This is just part of a series of four podcasts on the subjects around web data services and BI.

We look forward to future discussions on text analytics, cloud computing, and the role of BI in the future. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, one of a series on web data services, with Kapow Technologies, with a focus on information management for business intelligence. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

Enterprises Seek New Ways to Package and Deliver Applications and Data to Mobile Devices

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on new ways to deliver data and applications to mobile workers using Kapow Technologies solutions.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Listen to related webinar. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on bringing more data to the mobile tier. We'll look at innovative ways to extract and make enterprise data ready to be accessed and consumed by mobile device users.

This has been a thorny problem for many years now, and the approach of Kapow Technologies in focusing on the Web browser on the mobile device has some really neat benefits. Kapow's goal is to allow data to be much more efficiently used beyond the limited range and confines of traditional enterprise applications and interfaces, when delivered out through mobile networks.

As enterprises seek to cut cost, while boosting real world productivity, using ubiquitous mobile devices and networks to deliver actionable and real-time data to business workers in their environment has never been more economical and never has made more sense.

Here to provide an in-depth look at how more enterprises and their data can be packaged and delivered effectively to more mobile users, is JP Finnell, CEO of Mobility Partners, a wireless mobility consulting firm. Welcome to the show, JP.

JP Finnell: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also joined by Stefan Andreasen, founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. Welcome back to the show, Stefan.

Stefan Andreasen: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: We're also joined by Ron Yu, head of marketing at Kapow. Thanks for coming on the show, Ron.

Ron Yu: Thanks for having us, Dana.

Gardner: I want to take a look at the state of mobile applications and the need now to get fresh data out to the field. Why is this a time when the imperative economically and in terms of business agility has perhaps never been as acute or as important?

Let's take this to JP Finnell. You're in the field and you work with a lot of folks who are dealing with these issues. Why is this such an important time?

Finnell: I used to head up professional services for Nokia worldwide. Before that, I was with the Deloitte Consulting, Xerox, and Cambridge Technology Partners for Novell. So, in the past, I've really seen these cycles and adoptions of technologies a number of times, and mobility is different.

Unlike conventional applications, mobile applications have a huge number of choices to juggle. There are choices about input and output, touch-screen versus QWERTY. For example, we've seen that with RIM recently, where there is a lot of controversy with the Storm device versus the touch-screen versus the Bold. So you don't really see that dimension in the traditional adoption.

You also have the choice of the device platform. That's also quite different from your traditional choice of development options. A lot of choices have been holding things back, and companies like Kapow are making it much easier for developers to get on board. Hopefully, later on during this podcast, we'll touch on some of the other factors that are coming in place to make 2009 a year when we're going to see some [large scale] adoption of mobility.

Gardner: Now, this complexity has been going on for a long time, and there are many choices. Aside from what we can bring to the solution on the technical side, from your perspective, JP, what is pulling people to find the solution because of the real benefits of moving to the mobile tier and leaving the PC back in the office?

Finnell: There are a number of elements of suitability. When I was at Nokia, we wrote a book called Work Goes Mobile: Nokia's Lessons from the Leading Edge. According to Wiley Publishing, it's one of the top best-selling books on business mobility. We're seeing that need to be more responsive.

Business processes that really either are business to employee (B2E) or business to business (B2B) is where responsiveness and timeliness is really an issue. I'll talk more later about the application we did in the field for a major bank where we were able to take substantial cycle time out of the process. So, being able to be more responsive and doing more with less is the motto in 2009.

Gardner: Let's go to Ron Yu. What is it about data in particular that, at this time, can start to help these organizations be more agile and responsive?

Complex Legacy Systems

Yu: What we see within the enterprise is that the IT organization is really buried in the complexity of legacy systems. First and foremost, how do they get real-time access to information that's locked in 20- or 30-year-old systems.

On the other hand, there is a tremendous amount of data that's locked in homegrown applications through Internet portals and applications that have been adopted and developed through the years, either by the IT organization itself or through mergers and acquisitions. When you're trying to integrate all these heterogeneous data sources and applications, it's almost impossible to conceive how you would develop a mobile application. What we see IT focused on today is solving that data problem.

Gardner: And, what is it about being able to get to the data presentation beyond a full-fledged application that is attracting people nowadays?

Yu: The interesting thing is that Kapow is not a mobile company. The reason we're having this discussion today is because Kapow customers have actually brought us into this market. Because of how we have innovatively solved these real-time, heterogeneous, unstructured data challenges, customers have come up with their own ideas of how they can develop mobile apps in real time. That's what Kapow solves for them.

Gardner: Let's go to Stefan. Stefan, what is it exactly that Kapow is doing that these users have innovatively applied to the mobile problem?

Andreasen: Let's just go back to the foundation here -- why is the need for mobile application growing? It all started with the Internet and the easy access to applications through the Web browser. Then, we got laptops and we can actually access this application when we are on the road. The problem is the form factor of the laptop, opening it up at the airport, and getting on the 'Net is quite cumbersome.

So, to improve agility for mobile workers, they're better off taking their mobile out of their pocket and seeing it right there. That's what's creating the need. The data that people want to look at is really what they're already looking at on their laptop. They just want to move it to a new medium that's more agile, handier, and they can get access to wherever they are, rather than only in the airport or in the lobby of the hotel.

Gardner: JP, what's wrong with the way some of the other vendors and combination of hardware and vendor and service provider have tried to tackle this problem? Have they been using the wrong tools? Have they had the wrong philosophy? Why has this been so long in coming, and what's the alternative that Kapow and folks like you are putting together as solutions?

Finnell: Before addressing that question, Dana, I'd like to back up and to what Stefan was talking about use cases in airports, for example. We saw that in a use case for a major bank. This was a unique problem where it was a process that automated the capture of credit card data or credit card applications in particular.

You see these kiosks in airports, stadiums, and shopping malls. It's like in the airport, where there is really no power, and no connectivity. There's more of that today, but in football stadiums and shopping malls, it's still very hard to find a laptop solution that has power for eight hours and will have broadband connectivity. That was another unique use case, where there is a need for visibility and automation.

Gardner: I'd like to add to that too. It seems that there's a behavioral shift as well. The more people use smart phones, the more they're used to doing their email through a hand-held device. They cross this barrier into an always-on mentality, and they can't take time to boot up, set up, and charge the battery for a full-fledged PC experience. The expectation among people who start doing this always-on activity is that they want their data instantly wherever they are, whenever they are.

Consumers Driving the Need

Yu: Dana, that's a great point. Consumerization is an interesting market dynamic that is really driving more need for mobile apps. We, as consumers, are being wowed by the iPhone applications, the Facebook applications, and things that we can do in our private lives and in the social networking context.

When we come into the business world, we demand the same type of tools, the same type of access, and the same type of communication -- and we just don't have that today. What we see is the line-of-business knowledge worker putting a lot of pressure on IT. IT tries to respond to this, but dealing with the old traditional methods of technical requirements, business cases and things like that, just doesn't lend itself to quick, agile, iterative, perpetual-beta types of mobile application development.

Gardner: So, we have this growing dissonance between the expectations of the individual, the ubiquity of the mobile device and people's comfort level with it, and then the older approach and some of the solutions that have been attempted for mobile delivery which seem to be extremely expensive and cumbersome. JP, again, what has been wrong with the standards of the old methods?

Finnell: I wouldn't say it's wrong. I'd say it's incomplete. The approaches of these large platform vendors, and I am strategic partner in several of them, aren't strong, when it comes to agility, prototyping, and being able to accommodate this real-time iterative application development approach. That's really where Kapow shines.

Gardner: I've spoken to a number of developers over the years and they've likened this mobile issue to an onion where with every layer that you peel back, you think you're getting closer to the solution, but you just keep digging down, and there are more variables and more hurdles. Eventually, the cost and the delays have dissuaded people from pursuing these types of activities.

Stefan, what is it about Kapow that should help people become more engaged and actually look forward to developing in the mobile tier?

Andreasen: The answer is very simple. It's because we work in the world that they already know. If you want a mobile application, if you want agility, you want it in the world of applications that you're already working with.

If you're already opening your laptop and working with data, we give you that exact same experience on the mobile phone. So, it's not that you have to think, "What can I use this for?" It's about taking what you're already doing and doing it in a more agile and mobile way. That's what's very appealing. Business workers get their data and their applications their way on the mobile phone, and basically, it's making them more effective in what they're already doing.

Yu: Dana, the metaphor that comes to mind for me is not an onion, but it's really on a baseball diamond. When you look at Sybase and other independent software vendors (ISVs) that are selling platform and infrastructure, there are huge investments that you have to make.

To me, it's almost as if you are looking for that home run hitter, that Mark McGwire. I won't say Barry Bonds anymore. But there's a place to go for the home run, and to go for that large global enterprise deployment. With mobile apps, what we're seeing with our customers is that they want to hit singles.

They want to be able to meet the demands of a line-of-business department and to get that in their hands -- the 80/20 rule applies -- and get some experience and develop best practices and learning lessons about how they can iterate and roll out the next one.

I think Stefan is going to elaborate, when we talk about Audi, but Audi literally rolled out four mobile apps within the first week of implementing Kapow.

Gardner: Let's get into the actual solution. We want to solve these mobile data access problems. We're writing directly to XHTML. You refer to this as extract, transform and load (ETL) and then extension of data for Web data services. Help me understand technically what it is that Kapow is providing here.

From Laptop to Mobile

Andreasen: The best way to describe it is with an example. This is actually a real use case. Let's say I am the CEO of a big network equipment manufacturer. I go to the airport and I open up my laptop to see what are the latest sales figures. I have these applications where I can see sales data, performance, market changes, etc.

What's unique with Kapow is that you can go then to the developers and say, “Hey, look at this. This is what I want on my mobile app -- on my mobile phone.” And, they can get the data from the world of the browser, turn it into standard application programming interfaces (APIs), and get it through any mobile devices.

Just to give you an example of what we did there. With three hours work, we developed a mobile XHTML application for Blackberry that gave the dashboard that the CEO needed. That shows the power of Kapow right there. The alternative approach would be three months of development and probably $150,000 of cost.

Gardner: What's required in the handsets to be able to access what you're describing?

Andreasen: Handsets today are getting more and more browser enabled. So, of course, if you have a browser-enabled phone, it's very easy to do this. You can write just in XHTML as you've mentioned. But, a lot of companies already have like a mobile infrastructure platform.

Because our product turns the applications into standard APIs, standard feeds, it works with any mobile platform and can work in the devices that they support. You basically get the best of both worlds.

Gardner: How do we get over the hurdle of applications that are developed for a browser on a full-blown PC, where there's quite a bit of visual graphics and images, but we want to boil that down into really text and numerics. What is it that you bring to the table to solve that problem?

Andreasen: We recently had a webinar, and we asked what are the biggest challenges that people have. The number one challenge that came out of it was standard access to data, and that's exactly the problem we solve. We allow you to very, very quickly -- almost as quickly as it would take to browse an application once -- turn an application to standard API. Then, you can take it from there to your mobile phone or your mobile applications.

Gardner: People, of course, can deploy with virtual private networks (VPNs) and use a variety of secure socket layer (SSL) or other authentication, so that this data and this delivery to the mobility tier remains secure, and access privileges are maintained.

Andreasen: Exactly. We basically leverage the security mechanisms already in place. The benefit with Kapow is that you don't have to re-write anything or get any new infrastructure. You just use what you already have, because you aren't working with the data. You just do it in the mobile way you want to work with, and we allow you to do that.

Yu: What's powerful about Kapow is that we have an integrated development environment (IDE) that basically allows the IT architects to service enable anything with a Web interface, whether it's a homepage or an application. The power of that really is to bring the knowledge worker or line of business manager together with the IT person to actually develop the business and technical requirements in real-time.

This helps perpetuate the beta development of mobile applications where you don't have to go through months and months of planning cycles, because we know that in a mobile world, once you've gone one or two or three months past, the business has changed. So, as Stefan was saying, the ability to develop data applications for mobile in a matter of hours is powerful.

Gardner: Let's go to JP again. Give us a sense of what types of content and data have been the first to be deployed and delivered in such a fashion. What sorts of developers are the most ready to start exploiting these capabilities?

Funding Requires Business Case

Finnell: Dana, we're not seeing most projects get funded. Where the traction is today is where the projects are getting funded. Projects don't get funded unless there is a business case. The best business cases are those where there's a business process that's already been defined and that needs to be automated. Typically, those are field-based types of processes that we are seeing.

So, I'd say, the field-force automation projects, utilities or direct sales agents, are the areas where I'm seeing the most investment today on a departmental level.

Also, to echo what Ron was saying, you need to go through that prototyping or iterative phase. For example, we had these utility technicians in the field, several hundred of them. Initially, we designed the screens to be scroll down. An alternative user interface (UI) for that was actually to have a screen for each question. Once they answer the question, they hit the next screen.

Unlike a pure Web application, where you want to have a scroll bar and you scroll down and answer every one of 10 questions on a page, the technicians much preferred to have one question per page, because of the form factor. That only was discovered as a result of the prototyping. So, that's another example.

Andreasen: And it's a good example of exactly what Kapow can do. If you have an existing Web-based application with 10 questions on one page, you take our product, pull it into our visual IDE, and turn it into an API service-oriented interface. Then, you can put a new UI on that, which basically asks one question at a time and solves exactly the problem that JP is referring to.

Gardner: This strikes me something that's going to be even more important, as organizations adopt more software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and as we see more of SaaS providers deliver their applications for both a PC browser experience as well as a stripped-down mobile one.

We're already started to see that on the social networking and consumer site for users of iPhones or iPod Touches. It's going to be interesting to see if a field mobile warrior is going to be accessing this information through the SaaS provider, while they wouldn't be able to in the on-premises applications that are delivered through the enterprise.

It's almost as if the SaaS world is going to drive the need for more of these types of interfaces in the enterprise environment. Does that make sense, Ron?

Yu: Yes, absolutely. Once again, there's this whole notion of completeness that JP mentioned earlier. The SaaS vendors, the Salesforce.coms are going to be focusing on building out their applications. But, at a company level, at a departmental level, we're going to have unique requirements that Salesforce will not be able to develop and deploy in their application in real time.

Yes, they have the application, the AppExchange. And, you have access to Force.com, and you can write your own apps, but, once again, you're talking about software development. With Kapow, we completely leapfrog the need to actually write code. Because of the visual-programming IDE tool, you can actually work, as Stefan was saying, at the business logic level. You work with the interfaces that you know to service-enable your data and roll out apps in real time.

We see this is as enabling and empowering the IT organization to take control of their destiny today, as opposed to waiting for funding and cumbersome development and planning processes to be able to scope out a project and then to write code.

Gardner: Because of Kapow's heritage and the fact that it's been doing Enterprise 2.0 activities for a while now, it seems that, as the developers have become attuned to thinking for the mobile tier, they can, in a sense, develop the application once to then appear anywhere. Is that starting to happen, JP, in the market?

Juggling Mobile Choices

Finnell: One thing that's unique about mobility is the degree of fragmentation. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of choices you have to juggle, not just the device, but actually the platform. You have WIN Mobile, Symbian, UIQ -- which I understand filed for bankruptcy today -- RIM, and Palm. So, there are a number of device platforms, and then you have development options: mobile browser versus SmartClient, J2ME versus .NET.

Stefan and Ron could probably talk about some case studies that they have been seeing in terms of write once-run anywhere.

Gardner: Let's look at this same question, but through the lens of case studies. Now, you've got users like Bank of America, CNET, Audi, Visa, Intel. Tell us about some of these use cases and also if there has been a write once-run mobile, as well as through traditional interfaces.

Andreasen: Let's talk about Audi. It's one of Kapow's largest customers. It's very Web-enabled. Actually, we see that most companies are getting Web-enabled. Audi has a big intranet with a lot of applications.

One application, for example, is for the manager on the assembly line. He can monitor where cars are in production, where they are in the assembly line, and their status. He's walking up and down the assembly line and his laptop is probably in a different office. So, going back and forth to work on his application is very cumbersome.

One of the first things we did for them, as Ron said early, was build four mobile apps in the first week. We took that intranet application and mobilized it, so that the assembly line manager could actually stand right there in front of the car, pick up the phone, and access the entire application. This is an example of the same application existing both as a traditional browser application and as the mobile application.

The interesting thing here is that Kapow enables you to leverage what you already have, the Web browser application, and reuse and repurpose that into a mobile application in a very, very short time, as was just described.

You can take the equation further, if you're going to an entirely new application and you want output in both media. The key is first to get your data in a standard interface and then build on that. That's where you use Kapow. Get the data in a standard interface and then you can build it out for different media as needed.

Yu: Dana, would you like to hear about the iPhone app that we built for Gartner?

Gardner: By all means.

Andreasen: We just attended the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI) in December. They have a very neat website where you can go and check their agenda. You can also walk around with "the bible," this big book, and see what's going on.

Let's say I'm sitting in a presentation and say, “Wow. This is boring. What's going on right now that I'd rather see?” What you really would like to do is take out your phone, click a button right now, and the rooms and what things are going on now.

So, together with IBM's Rational solutions, we built a mobile version of the Gartner AADI agenda. Using Kapow, we turned the existing Gartner agenda website into a standard feed, and the Rational guys built an iPhone application on top of that. And we are promoting that.

It became a big hit at the show. All the Gartner people loved it. Virtually, you could build your own agenda. You could push a "Now" button, when you were in a boring presentation, and you could walk somewhere else. We got all the benefits of mobility with just two or three hours of total work, and for thousands of people.

Yu: Dana, the most amazing thing about this is that Stefan and I had a conversation on Thursday evening in preparation for a mobile analyst meeting that we were going to be having at the show.

We said, “Wouldn't it be great to walk into that briefing with an iPhone app?” And, Stefan said, "Great." So, in the evening, he spent an hour-and-a-half to create this service feed and he contacted our partner at IBM. In an hour-and-a-half, they used their tool and developed that application. It was just phenomenal. Stefan, why don't you talk about the interactions that you've had with the IT folks at Gartner?

Andreasen: The IT folks of Gartner, of course, were amazed that we could actually produce this and they could see how popular it became. I ended up having a meeting with them, and we're talking with them right now. Actually, if anybody want to see this application, we have it live running on our website under the Mobile Solutions page. So, please feel free to go there and check it out.

Same-Day Development

Yu: This is really a perfect example of how the enterprise in 2009 will operate -- the ability to wake up one day and to have a line-of-business or an IT person, conceive a mobile application and to be able to deploy it within the same day. It's powerful and, hopefully, we'll see more examples of what we did for Gartner within global enterprises.

Gardner: This also raises another issue, which probably is sufficient for an entirely separate podcast, and that's the juxtaposition of this sort of data with location and positioning services. Perhaps at a conference not only would you want a room number, but you might be able to get directions to it and be able to juxtapose these services.

Quickly, to anyone on the panel, what is it now that enterprises should consider, not only delivering this data out to a mobile device, but juxtaposing it with location services and what that could offer?

Andreasen: I think there's a more fundamental question. Can we leverage different sources of information into the same application. If we just go back to the Gartner thing, I could pull out the name of the room, but I didn't have a map on the Gartner side. The hotel itself, of course, has a separate website with hotel information, maps, and everything.

We could actually use our product and service-enable that as well, combine the two, and get a new mash-up mobile application, where you leverage the benefit of multiple applications that couldn't even work together before. That's one answer to that question. You can now combine and mash up several applications and get the combined efficiency.

Gardner: That strikes me as the real return-on-investment (ROI) benefit, because not only are you justifying the cost of delivering the data, but you are able to then use that data for much higher productivity, when you do these as a mash-up. That's really important in our economic climate -- basically 2+2 = 6 -- and that's what I think we're talking about here.

Andreasen: Exactly. Today, people have to look at different places on their paper and, in their mind, combine things. That's what you can automate and create a lot of efficiency.

Gardner: We're almost out of time. What does the future portend for Kapow and some of these mobile services? Is there a road map for improving the breadth and scope of the solution? Once again, I'll throw this out to anyone on the panel.

Andreasen: There is one thing that we're doing, you mentioned as earlier, with SaaS. We launched Kapow OnDemand half-a-year ago and we can see that that's driving a lot of mobile business. So, now we can use our product, not only for on-premises solution, but also in the cloud. We see that as a major driver in our road map to support that.

Yu: The other thing is that I think it's pretty clear now that, from our perspective and from JP's perspective, there are no clearly defined mobile applications. We see the ISVs and IT organizations focused on security and infrastructure.

But, really, beyond email there hasn't been one killer app. I think that tells a story that every enterprise will have their specific mobile apps that they are going to roll out. At Kapow, we will continue to mobile-enable IT organizations to be able to roll out applications as quickly as they can conceive them.

The other part of that is that we will continue to focus on partnering. At Kapow, we will not be a mobile ISV, per se, but will continue to partner with the platform providers to help drive more adoption of mobile.

Gardner: JP hit on this little earlier when he was focused on the business process. Perhaps we're not going to see mobile killer apps or killer mobile apps, but killer business processes that need to have a mobile element to them.

Finnell: That's right, and there is something that I call "strategy emerging from experience." The best way to get adoption in your enterprise is to rapidly iterate at the departmental level, gain experience that way, create centralized governance or coordinative governance that captures the lessons from those, and then become more strategic.

What I am seeing in 2009 is a good experience space. Almost every enterprise today has at least one department that's doing something around mobile. One way to get that to be more strategic is to be more iterative with your approach.

Gardner: Well, great. We've been talking about delivering more content and data out to a mobile tier, but without some of the pain, expense, and complexity that's been traditional in these activities. We've been joined by a panel of JP Finnell, CEO of Mobility Partners. Thanks so much for joining.

Finnell: Thank you.

Gardner: We also had Stefan Andreasen, founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. Thank you, Stefan.

Andreasen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Also Ron Yu, head of marketing for Kapow. I appreciate your input, Ron.

Yu: Thank you, Dana, I enjoyed the discussion.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Listen to related webinar. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on new ways to deliver data and applications to mobile workers using Kapow Technologies solutions. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.