Introduction

Who is Kinetic Data?

Kinetic Data is an enterprise software company with a focus on digital processes for complex organizations. We want to help small teams make a big dent through highly scalable applications that make their world better, faster, and more efficient. In short, Kinetic provides all of the common stuff that's needed to build an application at an enterprise scale.

We combine the best of pro-code development with low-code capabilities to enable top organizations to achieve their digital modernization goals. Our approach is to provide a framework that lets developers (otherwise known as “builders”) create highly configurable digital experiences that are functional, scalable, and secure. Those builders can then iterate and improve upon the experiences they’ve created as opportunities for improvement present themselves.

With Kinetic, you get the building blocks necessary to create business applications that are wicked fast, highly scalable, and secure.

What We’re About

Our goal is to deliver the world’s greatest tools for building process excellence. We think that in order to get the most out of our offerings, you need to understand why we went about designing the Platform the way we did. Let’s discuss the core philosophies behind the Kinetic Platform.

First, the Fundamentals

We’re here to help you build processes that grow and change with your organization, not to make your organization adapt to our platform. Every design decision we make takes into account the 17 core attributes for low-code platforms, or “-ilities”, that let you assemble technology that does exactly what the business needs.

Secure Architecture

Zero Trust security practices are growing in popularity in both government and commercial enterprises. The Kinetic Platform is designed to use attribute-based access control security. This approach allows for fine-grained control when managing what users can see and what functions they can perform, and helps you avoid the “group explosion” situations that can arise in role-based access control systems as a system continues to grow.

Emphasis on Performance

Our goal is to enable systems and processes to be fast: to change fast, upgrade fast, and even fail fast (so you can fix it fast, of course). Here’s how we went about it:

• Horizontal scaling: We chose a horizontal scaling approach, embedding technologies like Kubernetes and Cassandra in our stack to ensure that the platform can grow with your organization as usage expands. This method lets you address large volumes of users or data by adding more machines, ensuring performance stays up regardless of how much data is being processed on the back end.
• Asynchronous workflows: We designed our workflow processes to run asynchronously. That means a user filling out a work order can submit the request and move on to the next thing, even if there are five different queries for the work order still processing in the task module.
• Cross-Form submission searching: Common fields are written to a single form used across different components. This lets you search for submission data across multiple components while improving performance and reducing instances of duplicate information.
• Performance-based indexing approach: Traditionally, application owners rely on a database administrator to design a database schema that’s properly indexed for speedy searches. With the Kinetic Platform, system admins are responsible for defining combinations of fields that users want to query. Index records are built behind the scenes to ensure that queries execute quickly on large datasets.

Backend as a Service

We deliver backend services such as storage, connectivity, and processing, helping you develop and run your own applications while removing the need to set up and maintain servers or manage complex infrastructure. Our API and SDK offerings handle some of the most common areas of development, including user management and authentication, security and permissions, and error handling. This lets your builders focus on more company-specific areas of development and saves development time overall.

Iterate to Excellence

At Kinetic, we believe perfection is the enemy of progress. Even if the early iterations of a process don’t have a perfectly realized set of requirements, we think it’s better to establish an initial process that adds value, then continue to build upon it as opportunities for improvement present themselves - all without interrupting the version of the process that’s in production.

Reuse What Works

We’ve included options to clone, export, and import forms and workflows, making it easy to tweak your existing processes to fit a new need without starting from scratch each time.

Open Integration

We chose to build the Platform on an open integration framework because we think the Platform should never be the reason why you have to wait to fix an integration or add a new capability. This way, the Platform can effectively interact with any system your organization might have. This approach makes it possible for you to create your own integrations to your own custom systems or existing systems we don't have a pre-built integration for.

Common Frameworks

We use common frameworks in our design so you don’t need to find a developer familiar with a proprietary language.

Headless Design

The Kinetic Platform’s headless design leverages our APIs to gather data and draw it up for the end user, leveraging whichever web front-end toolkit best suits your needs. This approach gives your developers full control over theming, branding, navigation, and layout. We provide sample portals built in ReactJS, but you have your choice of methods when creating your environment.

Visibility Into Operations

A common blocker in service fulfillment is the inability to easily look into the “black box” of email or other unformatted request types. The Kinetic Platform provides visibility into a number of factors, including:

• The number of requests
• The speed at which requests are fulfilled
• The location of “breakage points” (that is, the instances in which the fulfillment process is interrupted or stopped)
• The location of “leakage” (that is, a calculation of the cost of fulfillment determined by comparing the count and speed of fulfilled requests).

User Experience Matters

Projects with a subpar user experience don’t get adopted. Why have a system that no one uses? That’s why we chose not to go with a limited low-code UI builder and instead took a headless approach that lets you tailor the user experience to your user’s exact needs.

Support Your System

Our belief is that the software should support the way you work, not the other way around. Too often companies will attempt to rework their own processes to make them fit into the box of an off-the-shelf enterprise management system.

Goodbye, Change Windows

The Platform is designed to let multiple versions of a process run simultaneously, eliminating the need for "change windows" when introducing new processes or rolling out updates to existing ones. This approach reduces concerns around making valuable updates and does away with some of the process inefficiencies the Kinetic Automation Maturity Model (KAMM) works to resolve.

Upgrade at Will

System updates shouldn’t bring someone’s workday to a standstill. Our architecture separates updates to the underlying Platform from updates to the application you’ve built, meaning your builders don’t need to fear a Platform upgrade setting back their work on an application. This approach also reduces the likelihood of downtime scenarios (though realistically, downtime can still occur, such as in situations where an API undergoes a required update).

So What’s Next?

Now that you know the “why” behind our choices, let’s spend some time reviewing the “what” that makes it all happen here: Kinetic Data: Platform Components.