Introducing Kinetic Core: The New Foundation for Kinetic Request

Kinetic Data’s director of products Kelly Heikkila is presenting “Kinetic Core — The New Platform for Kinetic Request″ today at the 4th annual KEG (Kinetic Enthusiasts Group) Conference. For those who couldn’t make it to the event in the Twin Cities, or just want to relive the session in blog format, here are highlights of the presentation.

by Kelly Heikkila

We’re excited to have the opportunity to introduce KEG attendees to the Kinetic Core platform and discuss what it means for the next generation of Kinetic Request.

Our customers are doing great things with the current version of Kinetic Request—building out not only great service catalogs for IT, HR, Facilities and more—but also developing solutions that extend beyond the catalog. They’re creatively applying Kinetic Request technology in areas like:

• Facility Check-Ins
• Project Management
• Light Inventory Management
• Marketing Automation
• Incident Management

All the while building beautiful, intuitive service catalogs that their users love.  Our commitment to serving this environment is as strong as ever; look for new functionality including topics we’ll be discussing here at KEG around submission management, SLAs and more.

Making the lives of individuals just a little bit better has always been a driving force behind our products. A key aspect of this is ease of use – for all the roles that touch our products, particularly Kinetic Request, by:

• Making it easy for a requestor to quickly find what he or she needs and get on with the day—to stay in the zone—in a enterprise world often littered with horrible user experiences;
• Making it easy for a service/form/catalog authors to build these experiences for their customers;
• Making it easy for the admin to install, configure and troubleshoot the application; and
• Making it easy for the manager to see the state of their service.

In doing so, we believe this helps OUR customers foster a better experience for THEIR customers.  Faster installs means faster implementations, faster authoring means faster delivery, faster delivery means better service.

In order to truly embrace that philosophy, we need to be able to control all aspects of the experience and not be bound by dependencies or limitations of one platform or another.  To that end, we’ve been consistently moving toward a platform-agnostic environment for all of our products including:

• Kinetic Calendar
• Kinetic Schedule
• Kinetic Response
• Kinetic Task
• And soon – Kinetic Request

Being platform-agnostic allows us to:

• Accelerate development and iterate faster;
• Create easier to use authoring and management experiences;
• Store the data in a way that makes most sense for the application; and
• Scale up and down more freely at both a business and technological level.

Making this change for Kinetic Request has given us the freedom and flexibility to re-examine how we expose features and functionality to different roles – again, with the philosophy of improving ease of use and speed to delivery for both our internal product lifecycle and the lifecycles of the experiences our customers are creating.

In the process, we’ve looked at what is central to all of the solutions built on our current Kinetic Request application.  We’ve encapsulated that functionality and exposed it to applications through what we are calling our Kinetic Core platform and API.

This allows Kinetic Application (KAPP) developers to focus on the unique business value for their specific application, with the underlying details handled for them.

We’re thrilled to be able to give a sneak peek to the KEG attendees this week and look forward to showing it off to a larger audience later this year.

See the KEG event Twitter feed using hashtag #kdkeg15.