SnapLogic SnapReduce Hopes To Make Hadoop Easier To Harness

SnapLogic is trying to simplify the use of cloud services. This time the company is offering SnapReduce, a tool helping organizations integrate Hadoop processing into their environment. The company is also offering its own SnapLogic Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to make moving large amounts of data into and out of Hadoop cluster processing environments. This move appears consistant with their stated goal of creating a development/run time environment, an set of APIs and a set of tools that make it easy for organizations to integrate of on-premise data, data from Software as a Service (SaaS) applications or data from the Web and then  snap together data and processing tools to create custom solutions.

The first demonstration of SnapReduce, run on EMC’s Greenplum distribution of Hadoop, will be offered at EMC World 2011, May 9-12 in Las Vegas. SnapReduce will be commercially available in the second half of 2011. SnapReduce also makes use of SnapLogic's Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to make it easier to get big data into and out of Hadoop.

The company faces several challenges even though it appears that the technology is flexible and quite powerful. The first challenge is that while Hadoop and other tools that help organizations process extremely large, rapidly changing data sets are not of interest to all organizations. The next challenge is that SnapLogic likes to speak using the jargon of the high performance computing world without offering definitions of acronyms such as REST. The presumption is that the customer already knows them and will immediately be able to see the benefit of what SnapLogic is doing.

This is really too bad. The tools SnapLogic offers could help organizations utilize high performance clusters or, more generally,  big data. If the message goes over the head of the audience, however, it is unlikely they'll take the time to learn more.