No `single magic cloud’, so making integration easier is SnapLogic’s goal

“There is no question that enterprise business is continuing its steady march to the cloud, but it is critical to understand there is no single, magical cloud where all of an organisation’s applications and data live in harmony.”

So said Gaurav Dhillon, CEO of SnapLogic, in statement linked to the company’s launch of the latest release of SnapLogic Integration Cloud. This introduces built-in application programming interface (API) metering and management and a new monitoring dashboard for administrators. The release also improves scale-out performance for large enterprise demands and adds new and updated intelligent connectors, called Snaps, for a broad set of cloud and on-premises applications.

One of the company’s targets for the new release is the coming of the Internet of Things as whole new area of development for new services for business. The problem, however is, that the integration complexity this is likely to demand will be significant, as Dhillon also observed.

 “The Internet of Things is a noble goal but to reach it we must enable the integration of myriad enterprise and software-as-a-service applications, mobile solutions and devices.

 “There is no question that enterprise business is continuing its steady march to the cloud, but it is critical to understand there is no single, magical cloud where all of an organization’s applications and data live in harmony”

“SnapLogic is disrupting traditional approaches to integration by delivering a fast, multi-point and modern cloud integration platform so companies can go beyond hand-coding and first generation point-to-point tools. Instead, our customers reap the benefits of a faster on-ramp to the cloud so their businesses can run at cloud-speed.”

One of the key additions in the new Integration Cloud version is the introduction of API management and metering for administrators and API development options for mobile application developers.

Management and monitoring of representational state transfer (REST)-based APIs allows administrators to provision, manage and monitor API activity and performance. Provisioning of APIs includes granting access to authorised users and configuring metering service level agreements (SLAs) such as the number of calls permitted per day.

Developers can mobile-enable applications by exposing integration data flows, called pipelines, connecting to back-end applications as REST APIs. As a result, developers can expose data that needs to be aggregated across multiple back-end applications with no additional mobile infrastructure required.

The new performance monitoring dashboard introduces management views of pipelines and Elastic Integration execution networks, called Snaplexes. The new interactive dashboard delivers a greater level of administrative visibility and control, including the ability to visually inspect current and historical system data to identify and troubleshoot integration pipeline failures and performance bottlenecks.

It also adds easier resource planning and management of cloud and on-premises Snaplexes with real-time and historical analytics on active nodes and data flow distribution.

The new release also delivers a number of new features and enhancements focused on extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of data for the purposes of better cloud-based business intelligence and analytics. These include automatic schema creation, Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCDs) Type 2 and enhanced database lookups for Amazon Redshift.

One of the underlying changes SnapLogic sees coming, and aims to ride it as a market development. This is what the company calls the `Citizen Integrators’. To help this along, eachrelease aims to simplify the HTML5 drag-and-drop Designer experience. This can then help developer and citizen integrator productivity and make data access and integration more accessible to less-technical line of business users.

Significant end-user advances in this area in the new 2014 release include simplified grouping of Snaps by type (e.g. connection, function, etc.) and a single tab view of the Designer, Manager and Dashboard.

The company has also used the approach to build a range of pre-configured integration template packages for specific applications , known as Snaps. With the new release, SnapLogic has expanded its library of Snaps, adding new snaps for Type 2 slowly changing dimensions (SCD) for Amazon Redshift, Box, Facebook, FourSquare, OpenAir, Trillium and Twitter. SnapLogic has also enhanced functionality for Salesforce, Flurry, Microsoft Excel, Dynamics AX and SQL Server.

It also delivers enhancements for moving between development and production environments, as well as providing a claimed 3-5x performance improvement compared to prior releases.

Parallel processing optimisations and performance tuning ensure that the Snaplex execution grid can scale out linearly as more capacity is required. The introduction of a hierarchical asset model allows administrators to provide access control to all system assets, including Pipelines, Files, Accounts, and Tasks. They can also create and manage access control through groups in order to provide a simple and consistent permissions experience across all assets.