SnapLogic Does Data Integration On-Premise Or In The Cloud

There are a number of vendors that provide data integration technology, but SnapLogic is the first to provide data integration whether the data resides in the cloud or in a company's on-premise data center. The 5-year-old SnapLogic has introduced new features in its Summer 2011 release that add data cleansing, data enrichment and controls for data governance.

With SnapLogic, data can be managed and integrated with applications in real time instead of via time-consuming batch processing method. The company is designing its data integration tools to manage data on-premise and also in the growing number of cloud services, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), that companies are increasingly embracing.

"People are turning on these SaaS subscriptions pretty rapidly and pretty easily," says Clark Newby, senior VP of marketing for SnapLogic. "You spin two, three, four of these up, and pretty soon you've got an integration problem because they don't all speak to each other."

SnapLogic offers modules--called "snaps"--that customers can choose from to perform different types of tasks on the data, Newby says. They can drag and drop these snaps into a "designer canvas" and then run them on their Snap Server. Then the data management tasks will be performed on all data whether it's in the cloud or on-premise.

Among the data management features available are data deduplication; rules-based configuration; data parsing and concatenation, meaning data that are linked together; data cleansing, for making sure data matches the right format of the app; data enrichment, adding new features such as geotagging, which provides the latitude and longitude of an address to create a map; and data governance controls.SnapLogic is competing in a market with a number of established data integration players, such as IBM and Informatica, says David Menninger, VP and research director at Ventana Research. In fact, SnapLogic's chairman and CEO Gaurav Dhillon is the former CEO of Informatica. But SnapLogic differs from Informatica and IBM because they are legacy on-premise data integrators and SnapLogic has been cloud-focused from the start.

"[SnapLogic has] come at the data integration market from a cloud-based perspective. We see this as an inflection point in the market.There's something new and different going on here," Menninger says. "As companies go to the cloud they need to determine what data is in the cloud, what is on-premise and how to connect the two."

Menninger points to two other data integration players that began with a cloud focus, but notes that each has recently been acquired: Boomi by Dell and Cast Iron Systems by IBM, both in 2010. He adds that Informatica is also developing cloud-delivered data integration. All of this validates the market in which SnapLogic is playing.

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports 5 Steps to Agile BI (subscription required).