Kolla Blog

Today we are excited to announce our new product: Desktop Connectors! Desktop connectors, you say? Are we going back to the 90’s? In some ways, yes! SMBs all over the world still use on-premise desktop software to power their businesses. From dental offices, to oil changing garages, to fly fishing shops, a huge percentage still install software directly to their computers to power their businesses. Many of these small businesses don’t get access to other great software because modern SaaS companies don’t integrate with their on-premise systems. But our mission at Kolla is to give small and medium businesses access to the best software possible, and so we are going to help them do just that!

How It Works

We built a simple desktop runtime that is flexible to work with virtually any on-premise system. We call it the Kolla Agent. The agent opens a private VPN connection from on-premise computers to our cloud servers. Then we have “components” for specific integrations to run on our agent. For instance, one of the first desktop connectors our customers needed was QuickBooks Point of Sale. (Even though Intuit has recently announced the discontinuation of all desktop products, many companies will be on these for years to come.) Our QuickBooks POS component allows Kolla customers to access their own customers’ data through our cloud proxy, right to their customers data on premise.

What’s Next

We are going to rapidly expand our desktop connector catalog with connectors in industries like dental, animal health, optometry, point of sale, and automotive. It’s time to give local businesses access to modern software!

If you are interested, we are in private beta and we are building new integrations all the time. If you have one you need, reach out! hello@getkolla.com

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When connecting to third party software many things can go wrong. Configuration can be incorrect, scopes can mismatch, login credentials can not have enough permissions, just to name a few. The way software handles these errors is often a good indicator of how much a company focuses on software quality. Unfortunately teams that are charged with building integrations often put great user experiences on the back burner. Sometimes there is pressure to hit a deadline. Other times companies view their integrations team as a cost center and don’t give them enough budget.

Whatever the reason, one of the big advantages to using a third party Integration Platform like Kolla is that we eat, sleep, and breath integrations and focus on making all aspects of the user experience amazing.

With that in mind we have released an all new error experience for Kolla Embed. Specifically we have updated three experiences to make your job easier, and your customers lives better:

1. Better Error Screens

We now show a friendlier message to the user that is less jarring but lets the user know we have been notified and are working on it. We threw some nice cat photos in there for good measure to keep things lighter.

2. Logs added to Kolla Admin

We now expose all errors to you in a new Logs section of the Kolla Admin portal. Logs includes all errors and many other events such as credential access. This will help you diagnose any issues you might be seeing.

3. Solicit users when we can’t detect what happened

In certain cases, especially with OAuth2 flows, Kolla can’t detect what happened when there was an error. As an example, if you are using the HubSpot connector and something is configured wrong, HubSpot doesn’t return that error back to the software trying to connect. So what do you do if you can’t detect an error automatically? If we see a user tried to create a link but never finished and then closed the OAuth popup window, we simply ask the user what happened!

Results from these user forms are put into the logs section so you have access to them.

Obviously this isn’t perfect or ideal, but it provides a last resort to get some idea of what could be happening for connectors that may not be working right.

The Path Forward

Error handling in the Kolla user experience is now a first class citizen. To make sure we incorporate this in all future products we have added a section called “Error Flows” to our product planning document. In this section we identify any possible errors that could happen and we design and build error experiences that make the best of a bad situation.

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After a year of development with my co-founder, Jason Newman, and the rest of our small team, I’m thrilled to formally announce the release of Kolla Konnect, an integration platform that helps companies build, distribute and collaborate on custom integrations faster and easier than ever before. 

Not just another IPaaS

Over the last few years, integration platforms as a service (IPaaS) have exploded:

• Enterprise integration platforms are helping companies build out their internal integrations (e.g., integrating HR processes with Slack). 
• Embedded integration platforms help companies build customer integrations with no/low code workflow engines (e.g., your customers want your product to integrate with Slack).
• API management companies help companies build out their developer programs and allow third parties to write integrations with your products.

At Kolla, we offer all of the above, plus opportunities for new streams of revenue. 

Kolla solves developers’ three biggest integration problems

Problem #1: Integrations are time consuming to build and maintain internally

We know the benefits of IPaaS: Companies need a centralized way to connect and manage their ever-growing array of systems and applications. But creating and maintaining such an integration solution often requires a ridiculous amount of customization and coding by a team of experienced engineers. 

Problem #2: Integrations with your customers’ software can have security risks

Any integration can pose a security risk, and data becomes even more vulnerable as the number of integrations increase. These risks include a lack of interoperability between a growing number of security tools, hacked APIs, unauthorized use, non-compliance with industry-standard security guidelines, unintentional human error and more.  

Problem #3: Accepting, promoting and charging for third-party integrations could take months or even years to build

You want your product to be user-friendly for your customers, but building out your developer programs and allowing third parties to write integrations with your product is labor-intensive and time-consuming. 

Kolla’s solution to these problems? 

Simplify building integrations, secure data access and increase third-party integrations with your product—and create new revenue streams while you’re at it. 

The Kolla difference

Kolla offers three products to help you build, distribute and collaborate.

KONNECT - simplify integrations

Konnect is an embedded integrations platform that allows you to build customer integrations at lightning pace. No need to start from scratch; we have dozens of pre-built connectors to major software providers that you can configure and let your customers link to in just a few minutes. 

Konnect manages your customers’ links to those software providers, including the token refresh process and authentication procedures for the various data flows across all systems. This frees up developers to build business logic for your integration instead of worrying about things like OAuth2 and how to store tokens securely.

MARKETPLACE - showcase integrations

Marketplace is a fully white-labeled integration marketplace that allows you to distribute your integrations to your customers, or show them off publicly to drive more traffic and sales. You can even charge money for premium integrations/apps.

PORTAL - innovate integrations

Portal is a developer portal-as-a-service. Imagine having your own developer portal similar to Slack or Zendesk, but without having teams of engineers to build and maintain it. Your customers or third-party developers can collaborate, build and publish their own integrations to your product. You can even allow developers to charge for their integrations/apps and take a cut like mobile app stores.

In short, Kolla makes it simple to launch and manage your entire integration ecosystem. 

If you’re ready to simplify your workload with the best integration platform on the market, schedule a free demo today.

My co-founder Jason Newman and I are passionate about helping small and midsize businesses (SMBs) because we both grew up working in our own families’ small businesses. My dad built a book bindery shop from scratch, and Jason’s dad owned a toolbelt company.

As children of the 1990s, Jason and I were part of that weird middle generation bordering millennials on one side and Gen X on the other. We saw the world before computers and cell phones were prolific, and then embraced all that emerging technology through middle school and high school, including when, as pimple-faced teenagers, we built an online store together for the Newman toolbelt company (using OS Commerce!). 

It was our first taste of how technology could help a small business, and it’s become our lifelong obsession to help more small businesses. At Kolla, we’ve made it our mission to give all businesses access to the best software to optimally run their operations. We do that by making it possible for their software to integrate simply and securely.

While large businesses have teams wiring up their software to talk to each other, SMBs are often left in the dust with dozens of point solutions that don’t talk, leaving employees to input data manually between systems or without the ability to even use great software because of a lack of compatibility. 

Jason and I know firsthand how important software integration is because we did a ton of it during our time at Weave, where we built communication software for local businesses that integrated with their customer databases. Jason was Weave’s chief architect and I was the chief technology officer, and together we wrote over 90 custom integrations with CRMs and other customer database software for small businesses with disparate systems. Most of those CRMs were on-premise with no APIs and no developer portals or documentation. We saw—very up close and personal—how difficult it was to get our software to talk with our customers’ software. The process was tedious and required hours and hours of maintenance and upkeep.

In other words, integration was a total nightmare, yet it had a huge positive impact on small companies’ efficiency and processes. 

As Weave was preparing to go public, Jason and I decided to head out on our own, and we started discussing what we wanted to build next. Having been in the trenches of integrations for the better part of a decade, we knew that was a problem we wanted to tackle.

Kolla is the integration platform we always wished we had. It’s made of the lessons we learned and the efficiencies we dreamed of to make life easier for you: the CTOs and engineering teams of the world. All of Kolla’s products aid in accelerating and improving the integration experience specifically for you, the developer, because we’re developers too—and we feel your pain! 

We don’t build no-code solutions or drag-and-drop visual editors. Instead, we focus on tools to make custom integration code more secure and easier for developers to write and maintain.

The Greek word κολλα, or kolla, means “glue.” We chose this as the name for our company because Kolla will hold firmly together your entire integration ecosystem. If you’re ready to level up while simplifying your workload with the best integration platform on the market, schedule a free demo today.

When building a new integration for your company it can be hard to get going. At Kolla one of our goals is making integrations 10x easier for developers. But even when using an integration platform like Kolla, getting started can still be daunting. Today we are launching a new feature to make getting started even easier: Customer Invite Links.

Overview

Invite Links let you generate a secure URL that opens the Konnect Marketplace in a browser window for authorizing integrations between your app and third-party software. What does this mean for you? You can connect to your customers’ third-party software without making any changes to your user experience or frontend code. You can do this right in the Kolla Admin Portal and send the link to your customer to connect their software.

How it works

Login to your Kolla Admin Portal and go to the Linked Accounts section. A new button is at the top right of the screen called Create Invite Link. Click it and fill in the same information you would when creating a consumer_token on your backend system. Click Generate Link and you will get the URL you can now send to that customer.

Your Customers’ Experience

When your customer gets the link, they go to the URL and it opens up a page with the Konnect Marketplace. They follow the simple instructions to connect their software.

That’s it! Now you have a linked account to that customer without writing a single line of frontend code!

Other Use Cases

Here are some other ways Invite Links can be super helpful:

• You are trialing Kolla and want to use it without making front-end code changes
• You want to start building and testing your new integration without doing any of the frontend code to start.
• The person at your customer’s company that can approve this integration isn’t the same person with access to your software. For example: You built a new Slack integration and one of your customers, ABC software, uses your software and wants to install the new integration. The person that uses your software at ABC doesn’t have permissions to add new Slack integrations so they need someone from their IT department to do it. Now you can generate them an Invite Link that they can send to their IT team to finish the integration.

As always, let us know your thoughts at product@getkolla.com

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