SnapLogic is trying to simplify the use of cloud services. This time the company is offering SnapReduce, a tool helping organizations integrate Hadoop processing into their environment. The company is also offering its own SnapLogic Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to make moving large amounts of data into and out of Hadoop cluster processing environments. This move appears consistent with their stated goal of creating a development/run time environment, an set of APIs and a set of tools that make it easy for organizations to integrate of on-premise data, data from Software as a Service (SaaS) applications or data from the Web and then snap together data and processing tools to create custom solutions.
The first demonstration of SnapReduce, run on EMC’s Greenplum distribution of Hadoop, will be offered at EMC World 2011, May 9-12 in Las Vegas. SnapReduce will be commercially available in the second half of 2011. SnapReduce also makes use of SnapLogic's Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to make it easier to get big data into and out of Hadoop.
The company faces several challenges even though it appears that the
technology is flexible and quite powerful. The first challenge is that
while Hadoop and other tools that help organizations process extremely
large, rapidly changing data sets are not of interest to all
organizations. The next challenge is that SnapLogic likes to speak using
the jargon of the high performance computing world without offering
definitions of acronyms such as Hadoop and REST. The presumption is that
the customer already knows about these terms and what they mean. The
next leap is that they will immediately be able to see the benefit of
what SnapLogic is doing. That approach hasn't worked in the past and I
don't expect it will start to work now.
This is really too bad. The tools SnapLogic offers could help organizations utilize high performance clusters or, more generally, big data. If the message goes over the head of the audience, however, it is unlikely they'll take the time to learn more.