Kapow Katalyst Platform:
Automation Browser
The Award Winning Kapow Automation Browser
Business Applications are everywhere - inside your company, in your business network, on your customer’s website, and in the cloud. Additionally, content is dispersed around the web too; siloed in a variety of application types (enterprise, web, cloud, SaaS) and databases; scattered across extranets, intranets, XML and FTP sites; and locked in Flash, Excel, PDF and Word files.
The extension of business networks to the cloud and business partners is creating the growing challenge of integrating to an explosion of “application silos”. Urgent business demand to connect all these applications is growing in volume and the only way to deliver is to find a new, hyper-agile solution for applicatin integration projects. How is that possible? One way IT organizations try to solve this challenge is by hiring armies of consultants to rewrite legacy applications. Another is to wait for a 3rd party (on its own schedule, not yours) to supply the APIs or data feeds you so desperately need. Otherwise you are left with requiring your analysts or process workers to manually cut and paste data as an undesired “last resort” solution to meet their needs.
A faster, better, cheaper way
One secret to Kapow Software’s success is the purpose-built browser-engine of the Kapow Katalyst platform; the award-winning Kapow Automation Browser:
All of those ubiquitous data sources have one thing in common — their data is viewable in your standard web browser. The problem is that your web browser was designed to display, or present, the data, not to extract, transform, integrate, and migrate it from the source you're looking at to the place where you need it.
The secret to Kapow's success and the engine of the Kapow Katalyst platform is the award-winning Kapow Automation Browser:
- The first and only web browser purpose-built for secure and scalable application integration, business process automation and web content collection.
- Automatically and precisely integrates with virtually any application anywhere on the web, in the cloud, or across the enterprise, faster, cheaper and more accurately than any other method.
- Eliminates dependencies on APIs by integrating to any web application even when lacking documented API’s. Automatically transforms and cleanses data using powerful flow-chart based business rules and delivers it in any format you want to your existing business systems.
No more dependency on APIs
With the Kapow Automation Browser, no API is required because the powerful Kapow robots can access and extract data directly through the web application interface. The Automation Browser works with virtually any data access method, including standard SQL databases, XML data feeds, local or FTP based file systems, SOAP or REST web services, or advanced web technologies such as AJAX/JavaScript and Flash. And, it is extremely robust in the face of changing web applications and sites.
The Kapow Automation Browser can read the website data, including JavaScript and HTML, into an internal structured representation for robot access. Kapow robots then mimic your user interactions step-by-step, automating the business logic required to perform any transaction within the dynamic context of input values and selections. Control how robots interact with web sites and web applications using methods such as:
- Session and cookie control and persistence
- HTML Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation in any way before or after a page is loaded or executed
- JavaScript manipulation (re-write, add to, remove) in any way before or after a page is loaded or executed
Automatically transform and validate using business rules
What is a business rule? Humans and computers interpret things differently (of course). The human eye is very forgiving with respect to small variances in data presentations (we don't really notice); computers, however, require the highest level of precision.
For example, a person can interpret "9/28/2010" and "September 28th" as meaning the same thing; but, for a computer to understand this, the data needs to be transformed to be consistent with your existing data formats. Also, icons or images can contain data (such as an average reviewer rating which might be represented by a certain number of stars); the image needs to be transformed into the data it represents in order to be compatible with your existing data stores. Moreover, you may be extracting data in multiple languages, all of which needs to be transformed and translated to a common format.
To combine and integrate data from multiple sources, Kapow Software’s automation robots apply both in-process business rules in real time, and post-processing transformations, to normalize data and ensure uniform formatting.
In-process business rule examples:
- Check for valid input data against dynamic business rules
- Check for login errors, for example, if given wrong username/password
- Transformation and normalization of data - convert various data types into a standard form. Read more on Business Rules and Data Transformations
- Data de-duplication. Eliminates duplicate representations of data records in storage.
- Data cleansing. Deletes or deactivates data records no longer present at the source.
- Data change discovery. Automatically detects and reports changes to data over time.
- Metadata extraction. Links metadata with extracted data to facilitate search and analysis.