If you use Google Now, you’ll immediately understand what Sapho Inc. is up to.

Google Now is the Android-based automated assistant that watches what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with and presents information it thinks may interest you. For example, it’ll tell you when it’s time to leave for your 10 AM appointment or what the score was in last night’s Giants game.

Sapho wants to bring that functionality to the enterprise. The startup, which has raised $9.5 million, is today unveiling the Sapho Micro App Platform, a toolset that enables organizations to translate existing business systems into secure micro apps that connect people with important data and critical workflows.

From pull to push

Sapho is capitalizing on the shift from “pull” to “push” metaphors in the way people retrieve information, a consequence of the popularity of activity streams, notifications and now bots. Basically, instead of finding information, people increasingly expect information to come to them. The Facebook news feed is an example of how intelligent systems are figuring out what we need to know and presenting the most important information first.

Most enterprise applications don’t work that way, however. Employees have to remember to log on to separate systems to retrieve information, which means important events are missed and time is wasted hunting around.

“Most people in the enterprise regularly touch 25 to 30 systems a year,” said Fouad ElNaggar, CEO and co-founder of Sapho. “Employees are plagued with feature-bloated apps and siloed systems that leave data fragmented or inaccessible.”

Sapho’s micro app is essentially a notification with interactive and workflow capabilities. For example, Expensify, Inc.’s expense reporting application can trigger a reminder message to a user’s smart phone that an expense report is due. The person can review the report and submit it via the micro app, without ever logging into the Expensify back-end.

“Rather than have them going into all those systems of record, we bring those systems to them,” ElNaggar said.

Sapho calls its technology “extract, transform, notify,” a play on the extract/transform/load process that is familiar to all database administrators. The platform connects to back-end enterprise applications via an on-premise Java server. It works with existing APIs or custom integration via vendor partnerships to detect when changes occur in the applications. Those changes can then trigger emails, texts, Slack updates and other messages.

Workflow features

The system connects to master accounts and uses delegated authentication rather than connecting to individual user accounts. This enables administrators to create workflows and to map events to groups as well as to individuals. Building workflows is a drag-and-drop process, Sapho said. IT administrators can build workflows that span multiple systems and constituencies. Micro apps push information to employees’ devices, allowing them to complete a task from their feed or secure micro app without logins.

In the same way that Google Now continually seeks feedback on the cards it pushes to users, Sapho uses machine learning to become smarter over time about the information users really want. Sapho comes with built-in connectors to more than 60 data warehouses, Web services, databases and identity providers. The company expects to add to that list over time, and customers can create their own connection using a Java-based software development kit.

Sapho said dozens of organizations are already using its platform, including CBS Interactive Inc., Kubernetes, RPX Corp. and Turner Broadcasting System Inc.

Sapho can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The software carries an annual license and setup fee of at least $10,000 with each user priced at $3 to $10 per month.