Bringing AI to enterprise integration
Driving long distances (or using New York City’s subway system) used to be a much more complicated affair, generally requiring maps, a sense of direction, some luck and the occasional stop to ask questions of strangers.
Turn-by-turn navigation apps have changed all that: You may still take a wrong turn along the way, but the apps usually get you back on track with little fuss. Self-service integration specialist SnapLogic is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help its customers achieve that sort of turn-by-turn navigation when it comes to enterprise integration.
Citing GPS navigation and digital home assistants like Amazon‘s Alexa, SnapLogic Founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon says the company‘s new technology, Iris, will eliminate the integration backlog that stifles so many technology initiatives through the use of AI to automate highly repetitive, low-level development tasks.
“Companies can’t innovate and transform their businesses if they’re bogged down in rote, repetitive tasks that don’t do much for the organization,” Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said in a statement last week. “Machine learning is emerging as the engine behind what Constellation calls ‘human augmentation.’ These next-generation systems will harness the computing power and data scale of the cloud to automate routine work so humans can concentrate on innovating and driving better business outcomes.”
“We believe it has the promise to do to the world of integration what map apps have done for the world of transportation,” Dhillon adds.
SnapLogic’s platform, the Enterprise Integration Cloud, is inspired by LEGO bricks, which can all snap together, regardless of the set from which they originally hail. Traditional integration software requires painstaking, hand-crafted coding by teams of developers. The Enterprise Integration Cloud, on the other hand, uses connectivity software it calls “Snaps.”
“A Snap is a collection of integration components, sharing some contextual property, generally an application,” Dhillon wrote in a 2011 blog post. “Snaps include powerful wizards that inspect their target application; automatically building links throughout the data layer, giving a user the ‘create,’ ‘read,’ ‘update’ and ‘delete’ functionality they will use in their integration. Snaps are language-neutral and abstracted from the application layer. They use open protocols (HTTP/S) and data formats (REST), and supply a URI to all resources. They shield both business users and developers from much of the complexity of the underlying application, data model and service.”
All Snaps follow the same pattern, use the same API and leverage the underlying infrastructure.
