mwd advisors provides insights into SnapLogic, a software company focused on hybrid integration through its elastic integration platform, which unifies real-time and batch data integration. Founded in 2006 and venture-funded, SnapLogic offers a flexible deployment across multiple environments, including cloud and on-premises, and aims to simplify the integration landscape amid growing cloud and big data needs. The platform is particularly suitable for organizations with complex IT infrastructures and offers scalability, adaptability, and an extensive library of reusable integration components.

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Neil Ward-Dutton
Technology & Suppliers
On the Radar: SnapLogic
February 2016
SnapLogic is a US-based, venture-funded software company that is attempting to reinvent integration platform
technology – by creating one unified platform that can address many different kinds of application and data
integration use cases.

2. On the Radar: SnapLogic 2
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Who?
SnapLogic (www.snaplogic.com) is a specialist software vendor focused on what it calls ‘hybrid integration’ –
automating multiple kinds of integration data flows and transformations with their own specialised operational
needs, all from one shared technology platform. SnapLogic was founded in 2006 by Ghaurav Dhillon, former
co-founder of Informatica and is venture funded. The company’s based in San Mateo CA, and also has offices
in Boulder, Boston and New York; in Hyderabad, India; and in Australia.
What does it do?
SnapLogic’s core offering is its Elastic Integration Platform, which – unusually – can address the requirements of
both real-time (traditionally addressed with ESB technology), and batch-oriented (traditionally addressed with
ETL technology) data integration scenarios. The platform has three core elements:
! The SnapLogic Integration Cloud. This multi-tenant, AWS-hosted platform delivers SnapLogic’s suite
of HTML5-based tools for deploying, managing and monitoring integration logic:
o Designer – a graphical, drag-and-drop specification tool, aimed at integration developers, for
assembling and configuring data processing ‘pipelines’ (see figure 1 for an example) that take
data from one or more sources and process it to create one or more result sets. Depending on
the specific configuration of the platform you’re working with (see below), you have a particular
palette of functions available from which to construct pipelines.
o Manager – an administration tool for configuring access to the Integration Cloud, configure
project settings and set up security schemes.
o Dashboard – a graphical tool that lets administrators track the health of running pipelines,
regardless of their deployment location, and audit historical execution too.
! The Snaplex – an elastic (horizontally scalable) fabric of server nodes (Java virtual machines) that
execute your integration pipelines. Customers can deploy multiple Snaplexes and associate them with
one Integration Cloud instance: so with one management account and one central set of tools, you can
specify and control integration pipelines across multiple scenarios and use cases.
! A growing library of ‘Snaps’ – off-the-shelf, configurable adapters that abstract away the detailed
implementation details of connecting to, and making sense of, the integration APIs and data structures
used by popular business applications and popular analytics tools. Customers can also build their own.
SnapLogic has designed the Snaplex execution environment to be flexibly deployed across a variety of
contexts. There are currently four specific configurations of the Snaplex environment, each aligned to a
particular use case for the Elastic Integration Platform, and all based on the same core execution server:
• Cloudplex – a deployment of a Snaplex fabric that runs on Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure, and
which is primarily suited to scenarios where the main requirement is to integrate multiple cloud-based
applications and data sources.
• Groundplex – a deployment of a Snaplex fabric that runs in your own data centre, aimed at
organisations wanting principally to integrate on-premises applications and data sources.
• Hadooplex – a deployment of a Snaplex fabric that runs as a YARN1
-managed application within a
Hadoop cluster. The Hadooplex supports both MapReduce and Spark data pipelines.
1
YARN is a cluster resource management technology, delivered as part of the Apache Hadoop 2 project. YARN enables
Hadoop clusters to execute more varied workloads and support interactive and stream-based processing, as well as the
‘traditional’ batch-oriented processing that Hadoop was originally designed for.

3. On the Radar: SnapLogic 3
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• Azureplex – following a 2015 investment by Microsoft, there’s also now the option to deploy a Snaplex
to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Figure 1 An example SnapLogic pipeline in the Designer
Source: SnapLogic
Who is it for?
The SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform is designed for any organisation wrestling with the burden of a
variety of specialised integration platforms and with a desire to simplify their integration technology landscape.
SnapLogic focuses particularly on organisations wrestling with implementation of cloud-based systems and
applications; and those with active Big Data implementation initiatives.
SnapLogic is available with an annual subscription, and the base platform is offered at a fixed price, regardless
of usage levels: starting at $10k per month. Additional execution nodes and Snaps are available at extra cost.
Why is it interesting?
Organisations – particularly large organisations with long heritages and complicated IT landscapes – find
themselves in a position where they have very significant investments in collections of specialised integration
technologies that are increasingly difficult to control. Some of these technologies were bought when the
principal concern being addressed was how to create and manage data warehouses. Others were bought
when the principal concern was how to synchronise key data between individual enterprise applications. Yet
others were bought when there may have been a high-priority strategy to create master customer or product
data; and so on.
As organisations shift more investment (whether planned or not) to cloud-based platforms and applications,
and as big data technologies become better-understood, many organisations are struggling to make the case
for yet more specialised investments. At the same time, market expectations regarding ease-of-use and time-
to-deploy are transferring from broad consumer-focused online services to more and more areas of enterprise
technology, and the integration domain is no exception.

4. On the Radar: SnapLogic 4
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Against this backdrop, SnapLogic’s Elastic Integration Platform is particularly interesting for three specific
reasons:
! Uncommon deployment flexibility. The Snaplex runtime environment can be employed in AWS or
Azure clouds; in your own datacenter as a standalone environment; or integrated with Apache Hadoop
or Spark clusters. One controlling Integration Cloud instance can be used to control multiple
Snaplexes, all at once.
! A unified approach across multiple integration scenario types. Whether you’re specifying pipelines
for high-speed, real-time stream processing, interactive record-by-record data synchronisation
between applications or batch-mode bulk processing, the tools, the platform and the design approach
are all the same.
! Scalability and adaptability. The Snaplex runtime architecture scales automatically (up and down) in
response to demand; and Snaps employed in pipelines can be transparently updated in-place without
any platform recompilation, redeployment or server stop-start cycling.
How established is it?
On its founding in 2006, SnapLogic initially focused on building an open-source data integration framework,
targeted principally at providing data integration services to application developers and development tools.
In 2012 the company raised a third round of funding and refocused, developing the commercial offering that
would become the Elastic Integration Platform. With a fifth round in late 2015 totaling $37.5m, SnapLogic has
now taken over $90m in venture funding.
The company’s customers include Adobe, Acxiom, AstraZeneca, Blackberry, CapitalOne, Danone, Earth
Networks, Fox Sports, GameStop, GE, Gensler, IDG, iRobot, RocketFuel, Target, Uber, Verizon, Xactly, and
Yelp. SnapLogic’s Chairman and CEO, Ghaurav Dhillon, was co-founder and CEO of the data integration
specialist Informatica Corp. Dhillon made an early investment in the company, and joined full-time in 2009. The
company’s head of Worldwide Field Operations (including sales and service delivery) is a 16-year veteran of CA
Technologies; the CFO held long tenure at both NetApp and SunMicrosystems.
How open is it?
As you would hope is the case with an integration platform, the SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform is
designed with openness in mind. Although the company’s initial open-source work is no longer actively
developed or supported, the principle of openness is still very much at the heart of the SnapLogic proposition.
At a foundational level, the internal data representation used by the Elastic Integration Platform is JSON (the
open JavaScript Object Notation standard). Furthermore every deployed SnapLogic pipeline can easily be
made available for external invocation using the platform’s open REST API.
When it comes to out-of-the-box support for application and data source connectivity, there are already over
350 Snaps available from SnapLogic, and more are being built by SnapLogic and its partners every quarter. If
your required endpoint isn’t already supported, SnapLogic allows you to build your own with a well-
documented API and a Java SDK.
Although AWS is the default option for cloud deployment with SnapLogic, and that’s where the Integration
Cloud tools are hosted, SnapLogic also supports Microsoft Azure as an execution platform. The SnapLogic
Elastic Integration Platform has been certified for Cloudera CDH5 and Hortonworks HDP2.3.

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Who does it partner with?
SnapLogic manages partnerships with a number of well-established international systems integrators (including
Accenture, Cognizant, HCL, PwC and TCS); and also manages a number of key technology partnerships
(including with Amazon, Cloudera, Google, Hortonworks, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday).
Are there areas for improvement?
SnapLogic’s technology has a number of real strengths and some strong differentiation points, and the
company has an experienced leadership team. However there is still room for improvement, of course: the
company could provide much deeper change management functionality in the platform, for example, making it
easier for teams working with many pipelines, reused components and deployed Snaplexes to stay on top of
asset versions and configurations. Tools to assist with integration testing would also be welcome.
What’s next?
From a product development standpoint, SnapLogic’s main priority is to expand on its capabilities in support
of the creation of ‘enterprise data lakes’; secondarily, it’s committed to continuing to develop Snaps in line with
market trends and demand. From a business development perspective, SnapLogic’s main priority is to increase
its presence and capability to support clients in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region (particularly Australia and
New Zealand).
Should I consider it?
If you’re considering ways to make your integration technology landscape simpler, and you’re prepared to
embrace cloud-based integration design and management tools, then you should definitely explore
SnapLogic’s potential.