One of the best ideas I’ve heard for saving money on integration is to use pre-built connectors or interfaces and offer those to business users at a fixed price.
These pre-built connectors don’t have to come out-of-the-box: They can be custom-built by your integration team.
It’s one of the lean integration approaches John Schmidt used to cut integration costs significantly at Best Buy.
SnapLogic has come up with a way to simplify this practice for large enterprises.
The company has long offered Snapstore, an online market for selling and buying pre-built integration connectors. Now, organizations will be able to set up their own private Snap shops, where business users will be able to find connectors for that specific organization.
It’s an approach that allows IT to have absolute control over the integration connectors used, while giving business users the ability to grab pre-built connectors without worrying about petitioning IT for a custom code project.
The idea actually came out of a large enterprise customer’s requirement, according to Maneesh Joshi, SnapLogic’s senior director of Product Marketing & Strategy.
“They wanted the central IT to have absolute control over what integrations were built by different departmental IT organizations or even the line of business users,” Joshi said. “They wanted to own their own private SnapStore, where they could put all these custom components of theirs. It became a point of equation and control and a point of sales service for these departments, and so centralized IT does not have to worry about which snap has been used and how it’s being used and whether it violates any enterprise IT requirements.”
From a customer’s standpoint, that’s one of the more obvious changes in SnapLogic’s new release, but it’s actually not the most significant.
Last week, SnapLogic unveiled Elastic Integration, which is the company’s trademark term for its more virtual, scalable approach to integration.
What’s new? This release represents a major overhaul of how SnapLogic’s software operates. And at the heart of that redesign is taking advantage of how cloud infrastructure works, including using multi-tenant environments and a streaming approach that takes advantage of in-memory processing.
SnapLogic describes this as “three-way elasticity.” The software scales out integration in three ways:
- On-premise, to address enterprise applications that sit behind a firewall
- In the cloud, to integrate data from cloud or SaaS apps
- Between the cloud and on-premise. “This optimizes the speed of the integration execution by bringing compute to data rather than shipping data to compute,” the press release explains.
Obviously, SnapLogic isn’t the first to claim this kind of three-way integration. But what is and always has been noteworthy about SnapLogic is its devotion to the virtual environment, whether that’s SaaS or cloud or an actual virtual machine running the integration, as we see now with this release.
What it means for customers is no more worrying about versions and no more worrying about scale.
“Each tenant gets reserved compute power to get predictable performance at all times,” the press release states.
Joshi said this differentiates SnapLogic from other integration providers, whose approach to integration has evolved from on-premise solutions, rather than being developed specifically for the cloud.
Another interesting development: SnapLogic now supports multiple environments for development as well as essentially creating a development sandbox that will keep consultants from accessing your live data. Joshi pointed out that this is a compliance issue for some companies.
