Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

SnapLogic, a provider of data integration in the cloud, this week announced Big Data-as-a-Service to address businesses’ needs to integrate and process data across Hadoop big data environments. As our research agenda for 2013 outlines, dealing with data in the cloud is very important to organizations. At the same time, businesses need to be able to integrate their big data with all their technology assets, as I pointed out recently.

Our research into Hadoop and information management found fewer than half of organizations (47%) are satisfied with integration of third-party products with Hadoop. With Big Data-as-a-Service, SnapLogic addresses software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments, use of which our research found is being planned in 68 percent of organizations. Streamlining integration of Hadoop with other data sources makes it simpler to fulfill the information optimization needs of business.

SnapLogic’s initial big data support is focused on Hadoop and supports HBase, HDFS and Hive through read and write technology that is packaged together in what the company calls a Snap. Snaps are certified to work with the Cloudera Hadoop distribution, which a significant number of organizations that work with Hadoop in the cloud use.

SnapLogic demonstrated these advancements during this week’s Strata Conference and in a video that shows how to integrate and process social media information, such as Twitter feeds. The analysis examines the influence of tweets, and can take the resulting data to a cloud-based business intelligence provider such as Birst or pipe it into the analytics language R for deeper analytic needs. SnapLogic’s interface is easy enough to be used by business and data analysts as well as by more technical IT professionals.

SnapLogic has been supplementing its data integration technology with data quality and master data management over the last year that complement the core data integration processes. It also provides users the ability to monitor integration from mobile devices like Apple’s iPad. SnapLogic continues to grow its customer base with companies such as Activision, Outback Steakhouse and Pandora that like the simplicity and sophistication it provides for connecting across cloud and enterprise environments. SnapLogic also has great potential to help companies that use Salesforce, as that company has not helped its customers interconnect their applications.

SnapLogic has timed its market and product efforts to meet the demands of organizations that have seen the limitations of manual and custom coding. It also in late 2012 raised $20 million in funding to help spearhead growth in 2013, invest in its products and enhance marketing efforts. SnapLogic will need to add more Snaps to Hadoop-based technologies to ensure it can reach the maximum potential across this open source community, and examine integration with other big data technologies.

SnapLogic has a great opportunity to address a significant gap for businesses that use Hadoop and need to integrate its data with other applications and systems in the cloud and on-premises. With the largest obstacles to using Hadoop being staffing (80%) and training (74%), this support will be welcomed by many organizations. Our research into the financial benefits of addressing data in the cloud finds that reducing TCO (51%) and implementation fees (46%) are important, as is increasing the value of existing processes (38%). I look forward to seeing SnapLogic’s 2013 technology advancements and its support for big data.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO & Chief Research Officer