Thanks to the Internet, information is growing at breakneck, exponential speeds. This overabundance of data has organizations of all sizes struggling to access, make sense and act upon information in a timely and cost-effective way. Kapow Technologies delivers Web data services to Fortune 1000 companies, arming them with the real-time Web intelligence needed to be more competitive and profitable. The company's Kapow Web Data Server extends and modernizes business applications by completely automating the integration of enterprise and public Web data with no coding required. [See Appendix 1] Due to its automation capabilities and sophistication, Kapow Web Data Server often shaves weeks and even months off of IT and data access/integration projects that are traditionally completed through manual coding. The result is dramatic cost and time savings for users.

The Evidence-Based Research team at Morgan Stanley, the Global 500 financial services firm, needed a solution that would feed them with additional proprietary data sets to further inform and advance their stock recommendations. This includes non-financial data about companies being researched, such as hiring trends and marketing strategies, which is often available on the Web yet very hard to access and understand within the right context. Morgan Stanley also needed a technology solution that would help the research team manage data access and extraction for its complex research projects in orders of magnitude more efficiently compared with previous methods. 

Morgan Stanley implemented the Kapow Web Data Server to access, transform and deliver quality Web data used to publish customized information reports for its customers: more than 500 equity research analysts. This data, which had been traditionally very time consuming to access and transform, is incredibly valuable in that it is used to solve critical problems for institutional investors such as retail pricing discrepancies, inventory concerns and demographic analysis by store locations. In addition, the Evidence-Based Research team is faced with stringent global requirements because of its clientele's geographically dispersed locations and cultural diversity. Beyond simple language translation, the situation requires robust localization capabilities to ensure the data retains the proper meaning and context. For this reason, the Kapow Web Data Server needed to be able to easily adapt to Non-Western markets and languages during the data and content transformation process and for final delivery to the end user. 

Due to the size, extensiveness and detailed nature of the research projects the Evidence-Based Research team develops and delivers to its clientele, sophisticated Web data access automation technology is essential to the team's success. Within 10 minutes of receiving a demo of the Kapow Web Data Server, Morgan Stanley's Evidence-Based Research team decided to make the switch from its previous Web data monitoring and mining solution. 

Immediately, the Kapow Web Data Server eliminated the significant intellectual property issues the team faced with its previous approach. In the past, Morgan Stanley had to expose its data to the outside vendor, which would then create custom feeds and reports. Aside from eliminating the risks associated with exposing proprietary and sensitive data to a third party, the former "service bureau" method also required all customizations to be managed by the vendor on a request basis. This created huge delays in time to market, which Kapow was able to eliminate right away. By migrating to Kapow Technologies, Morgan Stanley upgraded to a complete data automation platform that empowered the entire department to easily get the custom data it needed.

In addition, the Kapow Web Data Server eased the team's pain of pulling custom one-off data assets from the Web and delivering it in a way that provides the end user a complete picture. For example, because Kapow completely interprets the entire Web site structure and underlying HTML/JavaScript, users can give graphical images a value, thereby providing valuable structure to previously unstructured data. According to Morgan Stanley's Evidence-Based Research team, this level of complexity and precision is absent from any other solution in the marketplace. Kapow's sophisticated transformation capabilities allowed the research team to easily adapt to the needs of each of its individual clients, delivering the information most relevant to them and in the most appropriate format. 

Yes

Yes

With this Web data services platform, the team can now transform data in any which way they choose, and even the least technical users are able to build Kapow's "robots" on their own, automating the navigation and interaction with any Web application or Web site to access the best possible data. Even if there are visual and structural changes to a given Web site, Kapow Web Data Server provides resilient surgical precision to identify and capture specific data assets. Additionally, Kapow's powerful data transformation capabilities allow the team to build human logic into their robots. As a result, any action that a user would make while viewing and interacting with a Web site or Web application can be completely automated within Kapow robots. 

As a result of its adoption of Kapow Web Data Server, the Evidence-Based Research team has increased its workload and productivity by 200 percent. The team is also running 80 percent more extensive searches in terms of the actual number of data sources and volume of data, which were not previously accessible. In addition, the team is able to instantly modify Kapow robots to create custom data feeds in a manner of minutes as opposed to waiting days and weeks with the previous service bureau method. This enables them to react to shifting market trends and respond to new research priorities in real-time. Morgan Stanley's customers are also profiting, now receiving significantly richer, more customized data sets, and quicker than ever before. 

According to Richard Hockley, vice president at Morgan Stanley Research, "When asked by Equity Research analysts if I can create a solution to understand a new investment debate, I no longer have to worry whether I have the right tools available to me, only whether the data exists."

According to Hockley:

"I was asked to understand the location of all stores within Europe of a major German retailer and whether the stores were cannibalizing each other and the demographic profile of persons within a set distance of each store. The stores had an online store locator function coded within Flash. Previously using other tools, we were unable to capture the Flash data and the large number of stores prohibited any work being done. Once we had Kapow, we were able to capture the store addresses, transform the data into latitude and longitude values via another Web site, query census sites with the address to return the demographic profile and finally run a JavaScript function within the robot to calculate the distance of the store to its peers. The process from conception to delivery was literally one week. Prior to Kapow, we had been unable to achieve this with another solution for two years."

Only the Kapow Web Data Server could provide the Morgan Stanley Evidence-Based Research team with the flexibility, control and depth in terms of data access, transformation and delivery of noise free data.

One aspect of Kapow Web Data Server that Morgan Stanley's Evidence-Based Research team has particularly communicated as exceptional is the product's AJAX enabled browser emulator. Because many Web sites are designed and developed to best perform in specific Web browsers such as Firefox, attempting to access data on different sites with the same browser can lead to significant problems such as incomplete or improperly formatted data. Kapow's browser emulator mimics whatever browser a specific site performs best under. With no browser restrictions and limitations, the team is able to attain an extra level of sophistication in the development of its reports for customers. The browser emulator capability is unique to Kapow. 

The transformation qualities of Kapow Web Data Server have also proved to be crucial for the project, since the team needs to not only access data, but also manipulate, transform, and structure it according to specific business rules. And by combining, linking and mashing up complementary data sets, the team has been able to understand and adapt to non-Western markets, producing a holistic picture of complicated market or business situations. 

Kapow Technologies was able to overcome ease-of-use perceptions by some of Morgan Stanley's less technical staff. According to Hockley, the combination of an intuitive and well-designed interface [See Appendix 2], and Kapow's thorough user training and back office support soon eliminated all concerns. Kapow also provided global video conference sessions to the team as part of the training process and proactively managed the product deployment with Morgan Stanley to immediately adjust and improve the quality of the Web data services. Today, even the least technical members of the team use the product with ease.

Kapow Technologies did not meet any internal resistance from Morgan Stanley. As previously noted, the company decided within minutes of the demo to sign up with Kapow and implement the Kapow Web Data Server solution. Kapow's advanced capabilities were immediately apparent over the deficiencies of other vendor solutions.

Exceeded

Says Hockley:

"The ease in which data sources, whether from the Web, external or internal databases or other structured sources, can be co-mingled to more fully answer critical investment questions without the need to build new and expensive data storage systems has huge implications for Morgan Stanley as well as other research teams around the world. You can access the data in its original storage source and let Kapow connect the dots to create the full picture. That's really powerful."

The team adopted the Kapow Web Data Server with ease immediately following the training provided by Kapow Technologies. Kapow has revolutionized the way Morgan Stanley supplies its Evidence-Based Research team with unprecedented accuracy and data quality. In doing so, it has greatly impacted team members' efficiency and ability to deliver greater value to customers. Once a customer project request is signed off, the team can now deliver the final report in one week's time, as opposed to requiring multiple weeks of work as well as the disruption and risks associated with having an outside vendor build custom solutions for each report request. Now team members can access large amounts of data from around the world and even do post analysis work such as feeding global content into a translation application to deliver that content in any language. Because workload efficiency has dramatically increased, the team today is able to scale its work and take on more projects  all with the quality, control and flexibility the business demands.