News

SnapLogic Announces Fall Release, Partners with Microsoft, Supports Workday

• By John K. Waters
• October 26, 2015

SnapLogic has announced the Fall 2015 Release of its Elastic Integration Platform. The company bills its flagship product as the industry's first unified data and application integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The new release adds Big Data integration capabilities, including Apache Spark data processing, a new "Snap" for the Apache Cassandra distributed DBMS and support for Microsoft Cortana Analytics.

"For the past few years we've been focused on cloud application integration," said Darren Cunningham, SnapLogic's vice president of marketing, "targeting hybrid IT organizations who are adopting cloud applications like Salesforce and Workday, and making sure you are well-connected to your legacy systems -- Oracle, SAP and the like. In the past 12 months we've been expanding our platform to handle the data infrastructure changes that organizations are facing."

The latest quarterly update of the SnapLogic platform comes with features designed to make it easy for users to build pipelines that orchestrate and transform data using the frameworks of their choice, Cunningham explained. "We've separated the design and monitoring environments from the run-time execution of data flows that you build," he said. "The result is this cloud-based interface that allows more people to very easily do the integration themselves."

These pipelines can draw data from virtually any source and are suited for memory-intensive, iterative processes, Cunningham said. Users can choose either MapReduce or Spark for data processing, depending upon factors such data size, latency requirements and connectivity, he said.

A "Snap" is a pre-built intelligent connector, of which there are more than 300 currently available from a Snaps library. According to the company, "Snaps shield both business users and developers from much of the complexity of the underlying application, data model, and service." This release includes a new Spark Snap designed to make it possible for users to build Spark-based pipelines quickly via a drag-and-drop interface, and a new Snap for Apache Cassandra.

The company has recently enhanced its Snaps library with a new MultiJoin Snap for joining two or more data streams, and enhanced Snaps for AWS DynamoDB, Azure Active Directory, Google BigQuery, JMS and Microsoft SQL Server Bulk Load, among others. The SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform supports Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR Technologies.

"We're the first iPaaS to focus on Big Data," Cunningham said. "Whether you're streaming data between apps in real time, or pulling data out of different systems for analytics, it's all about the data. This is the advantage of the SnapLogic platform; with one modern platform you are able to handle multiple patterns and styles of use cases of integration."

SnapLogic also announced a partnership with Microsoft to provide new capabilities for delivering application and data integration for the Microsoft Cortana Analytics Suite. The partnership will "provide customers of both companies a fast on-ramp to advanced analytics in the cloud," the companies said in a statement. Among the first fruits of this partnership are new Snaps for the Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Blob Storage. This release also supports deploying SnapLogic's hybrid execution framework, called an Azureplex, on Microsoft Azure with and within Azure HDInsight.

"The hallmark of Cortana Analytics Suite is helping organizations transform data into intelligent action," said Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics group, in a statement. "A critical part of that data transformation is connecting data sources, no matter where they exist within the enterprise, with Big Data stores and analytic tools without the overhead of manual integration or provisioning of compute resources. The Cortana Analytics Suite, with SnapLogic data integration dramatically accelerates time to value, and provides a powerful platform for analytics and machine learning in the cloud."