SnapLogic seeks to accelerate digital transformation with enterprise automation

Following a pandemic that halted the world in 2020 and forced organizations to develop new ways to do things, more companies are now leveraging cloud-based technologies for their business operations. With Gartner forecasting the global hyperautomation-enabling software market to reach nearly $600 billion by 2022, application management and data integration are playing a key part in the increased automation that enterprise technologies are now being built for.

Hyperautomation is no longer an option but a condition of survival for organizations, according to Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner. “Organizations will require more IT and business process automation as they are forced to accelerate digital transformation plans in a post-COVID-19, digital-first world,” said Biscotti in a report.

SnapLogic, a San Mateo, California-based company, offers an application management and data integration platform for on-premises or cloud-based data and process flow acceleration. SnapLogic’s chairman and CEO, Gaurav Dhillon, told VentureBeat that SnapLogic’s technology uses AI-powered algorithms to provide enterprises moving huge volumes of data with high-level automation — enabling them to be seven times more productive than when they use traditional batch-based reporting.

Dhillon says enterprise automation is the future, adding that enterprises are going to be hybrid and multicloud for the foreseeable future, as they operate with a combination of the technologies they already have while exploring newer, more effective technologies.

Latest trends in digital integration

Commenting on the latest trends in digital integration, Dhillon noted there’s no question that the future is going to be highly automated. The big difference between the old world and now is that today, Dhillon said, it’s not just about business intelligence and reporting — AI also needs data.

Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2022 highlights data fabric, which involves data integration across platforms and users, cloud-native technologies, AI, decision intelligence, and hyperautomation as part of the “12 trends that will accelerate digital capabilities and drive growth for technology executives in 2022.”

“In the old days, the consumers of data — who are usually humans — needed the data to make decisions. Today, the consumer of data is likely to be an algorithm, which needs data to do a better job of running the business, as well as the analytics to understand process flows and make smart decisions like taking customer orders, fulfilling each order level, tackling shipping logistics, and more,” said Dhillon.

With so many SaaS applications in the enterprise today, Dhillon noted that the future will have a high degree of automation. “We can have autonomous cars. Why can’t we have autonomous integration? We call that enterprise automation — one platform that connects your apps, data, APIs, and more,” said Dhillon.

Dhillon claims many enterprises like Schneider Electric, AstraZeneca, Adobe, Box, Yelp, Kaplan, and others are procuring SnapLogic’s product because they see it as bringing the best of both worlds — connecting legacy technologies and the cloud in a way that nobody else can.

Transitioning from relational data to unstructured data

Today’s data integration requirement is more informed in real-time business processes and automation of mundane tasks, Dhillon explained. SnapLogic’s continued forward momentum in the data integration landscape saw the company named the only visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, with other companies like Informatica — where Dhillon was once cofounder and CEO — as well as Microsoft, Oracle, Talend, IBM, and others.

While the company moves about 2.7 trillion JSON documents through its system monthly, up from 10 million documents monthly about four to five years ago, Dhillon said the real headline is the change in data. The transition from relational data with rows and columns like an Excel spreadsheet to unstructured data like the web, is the real story in the future of data integration, Dhillon said.

“There’s so much unstructured data in the world: web browsing, data from machines, data from routers and firewalls, and more. This type of data will become more important this year to next year, and even at the end of the decade. Therefore, companies that are built from the ground up to handle unstructured data are more likely to provide value to their customers.”

Key competitors and differentiation in the industry

Most enterprises, particularly service industries like banking and insurance, are most likely to have one-third of their employees moving data for the other two-thirds. This is a big problem that Dhillon claims is becoming bigger because of the amount of SaaS applications and unstructured data in the enterprise today.

SnapLogic’s first competitors are people writing codes by hand and those who get some open-source technology from GitHub to try to accomplish tasks. SnapLogic also has strong competition in legacy products from companies like Informatica, Microsoft, and IBM, as well as some new cloud products coming up and focusing on more cloud-based applications.

According to Dhillon, SnapLogic was built for hybrid-multicloud solutions providers. He claims SnapLogic is differentiated in the industry because of its capability to provide multicloud productivity in a way that both legacy companies and the new companies cannot.

Dhillon claims SnapLogic’s technology enables technical decision-makers to move beyond the frustrating process of data siloing. “Pillar applications like CRM, marketing apps, data warehouses all go to the cloud, and during this process, the legacy interconnectivity existing between these apps breaks. The most important thing for technical decision-makers today is that SnapLogic provides the connective tissues that connect data, application, supplies, and API management capabilities in one suite of products,” he concluded.