SnapLogic Hopes to Ease Cloud Integration Woes
Companies that want to adopt cloud-based enterprise applications seemingly face some daunting challenges when it comes to integrating them with on-premise apps or even other cloud apps. As Loraine Lawson wrote on IT Business Edge, citing InformationWeek's State of Cloud Computing Survey, a third of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application users do not even attempt to integrate them.
Integration specialist SnapLogic hopes to help address these challenges with a solution called Snap Patterns that it introduced at this week's AWS Summit in San Francisco. According to the company, Snap Patterns address the most common integration use cases and data flows for connecting cloud services like Amazon Redshift, Salesforce.com, Workday and ServiceNow, both with each other and with on-premises applications, databases and files.
“Our vision for Snap Patterns is to make cloud analytics, data warehousing, APIs and application integration even faster and easier,” said SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon in a statement.
The first of what will be a series of Snap Patterns designed for different cloud platforms, Snap Patterns for Amazon Redshift allow users to load and synchronize data from sources such as Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL directly into Amazon Redshift. The software is available as a 30-day free trial, with no on-premises installation required.
According to the company, Snap Patterns already in development for SaaS applications include Salesforce.com (order to cash with SAP and Oracle EBS), Workday (employee onboarding) and ServiceNow (trouble ticket resolution). In the first half of this year, SnapLogic also plans to launch a user community to facilitate sharing Snap Patterns for cloud analytics and cloud application providers.
Users of the SnapLogic Snap Patterns can use MicroStrategy, Qlikview, Tableau, Tidemark or other leading business intelligence (BI) tools to run analytics and visualize the data in the Amazon Redshift data warehouse, according to the company.
According to SnapLogic, Snap Patterns for Amazon Redshift will allow users to:
- Load data into an S3 bucket and kick off the Redshift import process in a single step.
- Easily replicate source tables into their Amazon Redshift instances and detect daily changes to keep data synchronized.
- Take advantage of core REST and SOAP Snaps for broader connectivity.
- Visually design a variety of data operations using a set of core Snaps such as Binary, Flow, Script, Transform and XML.
- Perform sophisticated extract, transform and load (ETL) operations such as slowly changing dimensions type 2 (SCD2) and database lookups without any coding.
- Start with a free trial wizard and upgrade to the full SnapLogic Integration Cloud Integration platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in order to connect to data from Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, Teradata, Netezza, SAP, Oracle ERP and other systems without losing any of their existing work.
Wayne Kernochan has been an IT industry analyst and auther for over 15 years. He has been focusing on the most important information-related technologies as well as ways to measure their effectiveness over that period. He also has extensive research on the SMB, Big Data, BI, databases, development tools and data virtualization solutions. Wayne is a regular speaker at webinars and is a writer for many publications.
