Yahoo recently released its Yahoo Pipes application which helps end users take data from different web services and manipulate it to suit their needs. If you thought it will be nice to have a Yahoo Pipes like application to manage your data from both desktop sources and web sources, then help is on the way from Apatar Inc. Apatar is an open source application that can help enterprises handle their data integration needs. According to a recent Gartner study, enterprises spends 65% of their time and resources in building bridges between various applications they use for their business needs. Before Apatar, there were some proprietary vendors offering solutions to the enterprises, to tackle their data integration needs. They were not cost effective and they offered very limited options to manipulate the data. Apatar entered this market as an open source vendor offering product support and training at a very low cost. Even though Apatar software is designed as an enterprise product, it could also be very useful for ordinary consumers, in their everyday needs like backup solutions, photo mashups, etc.

So, what is data integration?

Data integration is a process by which two or more data sets from different applications are combined for sharing and analysis. For example, a company in US will have a salesforce.com account for its sales department. The sales department will be responsible for adding the customer information into the salesforce.com account. The company might have a support helpdesk based on sugarcrm and the backend operations in India. The support team would need to validate the customer information from the company’s saleforce.com account and offer support to the clients, based on the client’s account status. The company has to integrate this data from two sources (salesforce.com and sugarcrm). Apatar software can help this company achieve this with just a few clicks.

What is Apatar?

Apatar is an open source application for data integration requirements. It offers end-users several advantages over other proprietary software. It doesn’t constraint the user in any way and it offers full freedom to the users in manipulating their data. The graphical tools offered by Apatar software even allows non developers to connect applications on the spot. This could prove to be very advantageous for the enterprise segment. Let us say that the marketing research team from a company wants to combine data from their sales department (which is using salesforce.com) and their support team (which uses some other CRM application), to study a particular trend about their product/service. In the old days, the marketing team will inform the IT division about their requirements and, then, the IT department will develop and implement the necessary software to do this task. This is a very time consuming option.

But, with Apatar, the marketing research team can put together the data from the two applications and extract the required information with just few clicks. They don’t have to wait several days for their programmers to develop the software. Within minutes, they can have a setup which will extract them the data they need. This is the power of Apatar software. Since this application has a modular structure, you can tame the Apatar in any way you want.

What does Apatar offers to an ordinary user?

Apatar is pretty useful for the end users, who are capable of installing the software on their machine. Once it is installed, Apatar offers various functionalities with just a few clicks. For example, an end-user could automatically backup the files in a particular directory on his desktop to Amazon S3 service. Similarly, the user could backup his/her photos from Flickr to Amazon S3. There are hundreds of possibilities offered by Apatar software to ordinary consumers.

What is the role of Apatar Inc.?

Apatar Inc. is the original developer of Apatar software. They offer the product for free and make money through product support, training and consulting. They have an active developer community, under Apatarforge, helping them develop datamaps for various tasks. You can find datamaps for manipulating Amazon’s S3 bucket, extracting emails from salesforce.com, saving RSS news feeds to CSV files, saving data from Youtube account to CSV file and so on. As Apatar software gets popular, you will find datamaps for all your tasks. If you are a Java developer or if you are someone who is in need of a connector to a database or a file or an API, you should participate in the Apatar community. You could use the product, provide feedback and bugs, you could contribute code to the Apatar software, you could develop new connectors and so on. There are plenty of opportunities to participate in the development of this exciting software.

In conclusion, Apatar offers enterprise grade solutions along the lines of Yahoo Pipes. It is much more powerful than the current version of Yahoo Pipes. While Yahoo Pipes can connect various data sources on the web, Apatar could integrate data from both your local machine and the web. The cost savings offered by Apatar to enterprises makes it a powerful application in the Enterprise 2.0 segment.

This post will be followed up with a Podcast interview with CEO of Apatar, Renat Khasanshyn.