Kapow, a company, created an integration between Google Plus and Salesforce.com Chatter at Dreamforce earlier this month. And it did so without the forthcoming Google Plus API. A new post on the company’s blog explains how Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform can use bots to login to sites and extract information and stream it into other applications. In essence, Kapow created its own Google Plus API that could be used with Chatter, or any other application.

Kapow Katalyst offers a point-and-click interface for building such integrations. Kapow, along with other companies like JackBe, has long been a player of the “enterprise mashup” market, providing businesses with the ability to find and manipulate data from sources that may not offer RSS feeds or APIs. It can be used for application integrations, as well as for building business intelligence or competitive intelligence dashboards.

Although this may not be a good long-term solution for Google Plus integration – Google could block the bots – it does demonstrate the power of using Kapow’s bot-based solution for other projects. “We’ve successfully done this with legacy apps (enterprise, ecommerce, banking, etc.), financial apps (hundreds of banks), partner apps (shipping, payroll, accounting, supplier, procurement, etc.), social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, TripAdvisor, LinkedIn), and hundreds more, including cloud and saas,” writes Kapow CTO Stefan Andreasen.

Services Angle

In an ideal world, all your enterprise software is built around Web oriented architecture principles and have RESTful APIs to make integrations and extensions easy. In the real world it’s not so simple. Tools like Kapow can help bring legacy or non-standard applications into a more connected ecosystem. Along with cloud integrators like SnapLogic and the out of the box integrations provided by products like Qontext, the service business continues to be disrupted.