May 13, 2011

Introduction to SnapLogic

I talked with the SnapLogic team last week, in connection with their SnapReduce Hadoop-oriented offering. This gave me an opportunity to catch up on what SnapLogic is up to overall. SnapLogic is a data integration/ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) company with a good pedigree: Informatica founder Gaurav Dillon invested in and now runs SnapLogic, and VC Ben Horowitz is involved. SnapLogic company basics include:

SnapLogic’s core/hub product is called SnapCenter. In addition, for any particular kind of data one might want to connect, there are “snaps” which connect to — i.e. snap into — SnapCenter.

SnapLogic’s market position(ing) sounds like Cast Iron’s, by which I mean:

Not atypically, SnapLogic believes that SnapCenter is higher-end than Cast Iron (which is now an IBM company), and that SnapCenter’s real top competitor is in-house/hand-coded integration.

*When discussing data integration, “SaaS” and “in the cloud” are close to synonymous.

What SnapLogic said about its use cases seemed to boil down to:

The main technical sizzle in the SnapLogic story is the SnapStore, with lets you download free snaps and buy unfree ones.* SnapLogic says there are 100 or so snaps in the SnapStore more, with a couple more being added weekly. That claim started making sense to me when SnapLogic said most snaps are offered by system integrators (as byproducts of specific integration contracts?) or software vendors (to connect to their own offerings?).

*I was expecting snap pricing to be subscription-based also, but when I went to the SnapStore this didn’t seem to be the case.

At least, I think that’s the main sizzle. I’ll confess to not having come away with much understanding of other nuances of SnapLogic technology. In particular, I don’t know what the core data interchange format is that allows all the “simplification” and “normalization” needed for this approach to be possible. So in particular I didn’t drill down far enough to uncover any limitations (functionality or performance) in that aspect of the architecture, and the same goes for SnapCenter’s RESTfulness. That’s all probably my fault; SnapLogic did put a bunch of good people on the phone, and we did at least lay the groundwork for future understanding.

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One Response to “Introduction to SnapLogic”

  1. SnapLogic – LEWIS Pulse – Public Relations and Social Media in Silicon Valley on May 24th, 2011 11:55 am

    […] DBMS2Introduction to SnapLogic […]

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