SnapLogic Spring 2012

Elias Terman, Director Product Marketing for SnapLogic came by to bring me up to date on what his company has been doing since our last conversation and introduce the Spring 2012 release of the SnapLogic platform. SnapLogic's goal, according to Terman is allowing the sharing of data from application to application across generations of systems.

What is SnapLogic

The company describes its platform in the following way:

SnapLogic is the only cloud integration solution built on modern web standards and "containerized" Snaps, allowing you to easily connect any combination of Cloud, SaaS or On-premise applications and data sources.

We've now entered an era in which the Internet is the network, much of the information companies need to coordinate is no longer held in relational databases, and the number of new, specialized cloud applications grows each day. Today, organizations are demanding a faster and more modular way to interoperate with all these new cloud applications and data sources.

The company offers the following products:

• SnapLogic Server — the central hub for connecting any combination of containerized on- or off-premise systems. The company claims that its technology "goes beyond traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities by offering discoverable, callable, and reusable data services."
• SnapLogic Designer — A browser-based tools to create and configure "integration pipelines" so application systems can be connected to one another.
• SnapCenter — A clustering solution designed to make containerized applications highly available. It also allows non-technical users to control and monitor the performance of cloud integration pipelines across one or more SnapLogic Servers. The product provides cluster management, job scheduling, failover, notifications and alerts.
• SnapStore — SnapLogic offers an "app store" allowing customers to find pre-packaged solutions that have been made available by partners and customers.
• SnapLogic Dashboard — A tool to monitor and manage the health of an organization's SnapLogic-based integration fabric.

SnapLogic Spring 2012

SnapLogic just released its Spring 2012 edition of the application integration platform. The goals are making it easier to follow the flow of data from one application to another, to find problems in that flow and to provide a query builder for the SalesForce.com object query language  (SOQL).

Snapshot Analysis

Terman presented a demonstration showing how a relatively non-technical analyst could gather data from one application, such as SalesForce.com, and deliver it to another application.

I had no doubt that people who understood what data each system contained could use the system to filter out the data needed for a specific task and then deliver it somewhere else. Data could come from quite a verity of systems including on-premise applications hosted on mainframes, midrange systems and industry standard systems as well as off-premise Web or Cloud-based solutions.

It was refreshing to speak with someone who wasn't trying to cast established systems that support the business as "legacy" and argue that these working systems should be discarded or replaced. SnapLogic clearly understands that application systems seldom go away. What typically happens is that they continue to serve their intended purpose and that the data that they collect is transformed to support other, future business requirements.