SnapLogic has grown well and rapidly since it pivoted in 2012 to focus on cloud-based iPaaS; however, the company continues to compete with on-premises providers, especially for big-data integration, thanks to its hybrid execution framework, which separates the design and management of integration pipelines from the runtime environment. Microsoft’s involvement in the latest funding round is sure to be a blessing, and builds on an existing agreement to provide integration for the Cortana Analytics Suite and Azure cloud.

1. REPORT REPRINT
SnapLogic raises $37.5m to fuel
big-data-integration push
MATT ASLETT
14 D EC, 2015
Microsoft and Silver Lake lead the latest funding round for the company best known these days for its cloud integration
service and big-data-integration offering.
SECTORS
ALL / INFORMATION MANAGEMENT / DATA MANAGEMENT / DATA INTEGRATION
ALL / INFORMATION MANAGEMENT / DATA MANAGEMENT / HADOOP
©2015 451 Research, LLC | W W W. 4 5 1 R E S E A R C H . C O M

2. Having refocused as an integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) provider four years ago, SnapLogic is best
known as a cloud integration service provider, but the company continues to compete with on-premises
data-integration providers with its Big Data Integration offering. It has added a $37.5m funding round, led in
part by Microsoft, to fuel its continued growth.
THE 451 TAKE
SnapLogic has grown well and rapidly since it pivoted in 2012 to focus on cloud-based iPaaS; however, the
company continues to compete with on-premises providers, especially for big-data integration, thanks to its
hybrid execution framework, which separates the design and management of integration pipelines from the
runtime environment. Microsoft’s involvement in the latest funding round is sure to be a blessing, and builds
on an existing agreement to provide integration for the Cortana Analytics Suite and Azure cloud. That said,
Microsoft continues to offer integration capabilities of its own, and is a strategic investor in SnapLogic rival
Informatica, while SnapLogic is increasingly competing on multiple fronts.
CO NTEXT
Cofounded in 2006 by Gaurav Dhillon, the founder and former CEO of data-integration heavyweight Informatica, Snap-
Logic initially established itself as a supplier of cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premises connectivity to the midmarket.
The company changed tack in 2012 to target enterprises, and rebuilt its platform from the ground up to create the Snap-
Logic Elastic Integration Platform, a cloud-based iPaaS offering focused on cloud application integration. Early 2013 saw
the addition of the Big Data Integration offering, focused on integrating data from Apache Hadoop with data from other
sources – both in the cloud and on-premises.
FU NDI NG
The company has announced a $37.5m funding round, taking its total funding to $97.5m. The funding round was led
by Microsoft and Silver Lake Waterman, the growth capital arm of Silver Lake, along with existing investors Andreessen
Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Triangle Peak Partners. SnapLogic plans to use the funding to accelerate growth and ex-
pand internationally.The company has approximately 150 employees, compared with 75 in 2014, and roughly 100 named
customers, up from 50 in 2014 (although it has more than 400 customers in total, thanks to a variety of OEM partners).
The involvement of Microsoft in the latest funding round is intriguing, and builds on an existing partnership relationship
between the two companies – in September SnapLogic announced that it was providing integration with Microsoft’s
Cortana Analytics Suite, including connectors (or Snaps in SnapLogic’s parlance) for Microsoft Azure SQL DataWarehouse,
Microsoft Azure SQL Database and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. The company further announced that it was creating a
new version of its Snaplex hybrid execution framework – called Azureplex – that could be deployed on Microsoft Azure
and within Microsoft’s Azure HDInsight Hadoop service.
BI G-DATA INTEGRATION
While SnapLogic is probably best known these days for its cloud-based integration development environment and the
Cloudplex iteration of its Snaplex elastic execution grid, it also offers a Groundplex version for on-premises integration
execution. With the Fall 2014 release, SnapLogic added a third Snaplex, called Hadooplex, specifically targeted at execut-
ing integration pipelines in the Apache Hadoop data-processing framework.
It followed that up with the Fall 2015 release with Sparkplex, which enables integration pipelines to be executed in the
Apache Spark in-memory analytics engine, as well as a new Spark Snap – one of more than 300 prebuilt connectors that
are used in the SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform Designer drag-and-drop development environment to create in-
tegration pipelines. The Fall 2015 release also saw the addition of a Snap for the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, and
there are also Snaps for Amazon Web Services’DynamoDB and Redshift, as well as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database
and MySQL, and Google BigQuery, among others.
451 RESEARCH REPRINT

3. 451 RESEARCH REPRINT
CO MPETITION
The company’s primary competition comes from fellow cloud-based iPaaS providers, such as Dell Boomi and
MuleSoft, as well as the likes of Informatica, TIBCO and Talend. Since big-data-integration pipelines are currently
more likely to be executed on-premises, SnapLogic continues to compete with more traditional on-premises data
specialists for data-integration workloads despite its primary interface being a cloud service.The big players in this
space are Informatica and IBM, while Oracle, Talend and SAS Institute make up much of the rest of the installed
base. Hitachi’s Pentaho is also targeting data-integration workloads, along with smaller specialists such as Diyotta
and emerging upstarts such as StreamSets.
SnapLogic’s embrace of Apache Hadoop and Spark is not exactly uncommon. In recent weeks Informatica intro-
duced Big Data Management, a single platform for integration, quality, governance and security of big data that
includes Blaze, a YARN-native high-performance execution engine; IBM released version 11.5 of its InfoSphere
Information Server platform, enabling it to run natively on Hadoop’s YARN; Talend added the ability to generate
native code for Spark; and Diyotta improved its support for Spark, enabling the generation and management of
Spark RDDs (resilient distributed datasets) for improved transformation performance.
However, SnapLogic believes it is ahead of some of its competitors in embracing integration with new data-pro-
cessing platforms, thanks to its ever-growing collection of Snaps. The company also believes it is differentiated by
its hybrid cloud-based approach, which separates the design and management of integration pipelines from the
runtime environment, and then enables users to take a flexible‘late-binding’approach to execution that enables
the selection of the most appropriate engine for transformations at run time.
SnapLogic also competes with data management stalwarts, including Oracle, SAS Institute and Microsoft, which
makes the latter’s investment all the more intriguing. Microsoft’s integration capabilities are delivered via Micro-
soft BizTalk Server and Azure BizTalk Services, as well as SQL Server Integration Services. Additionally, Microsoft
became a strategic investor in Informatica as the company completed it move to go private in August.
SWOT ANALYSIS
STRENGTHS
The company has continued to make good
progress since it repositioned for the cloud,
and is enjoying growing adoption of its iPaaS
and big-data-integration offerings thanks to
its Snap connectors and hybrid approach to
design and execution.
WEAKNESSES
SnapLogic does not have the highest profile
compared with other on-premises data-inte-
gration vendors, and its terminology (Sna-
plex, Cloudplex, Groundplex, Hadooplex, etc.)
arguably overcomplicates what is a simple
hybrid execution approach.
OPPORTUNITIES
Cozying up to Microsoft provides opportu-
nities for SnapLogic to raise its profile, es-
pecially as Microsoft puts resources behind
Azure and the Cortana Analytics Suite, while
the big-data integration market is also set
for expansion as adoption enters the main-
stream.
THREATS
The company is competing on multiple
fronts: in the cloud with iPaaS specialists, on-
premises with traditional data management
and integration vendors, and with emerging
startups. It may have to tread carefully as it
plans its expansion strategy.