We’ve recently talked about the 5 different signs that you need a better cloud integration strategy, including struggles with the integrator’s dilemma, swivel chair integration and considerations about going back to on-prem due to diminishing SaaS returns. As a solution to finding an integration platform to satisfy the 5 signs we’ve talked about, we’ve also come up with some key features and functionality of the SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform that you should know about, including its ability to handle both structured and unstructured data, going beyond point-to-point integration, functionality in hybrid integration use cases and the ability to scale out elastically. Read on for how these different features can help you jumpstart a new and improved cloud integration strategy:

1. It’s built to handle structured and unstructured data – our support for documents allows our Snap endpoints to directly consume hierarchical data in native format and send it on to downstream Snaps in a pipeline. There is also no requirement to flatten data into records or turn a JSON document in a string or BLOB type.
2. It’s built to handle streaming and batch app and data integration requirements – as Loraine Lawson has said in reference to our article Why Buses Don?t Fly in the Cloud: Thoughts on ESBs, putting a JSON format on a traditional, XML-based ESB is like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
3. It goes beyond point-to-point integration – in this chalk talk we talk about the challenges of point-to-point cloud integration and outline the benefits of an elastic integration platform (more on that below). SnapLogic operates on a hub and spoke integration architecture, enabling customers to incrementally integrate more complex apps both in the cloud and on-premises at a much lower cost than traditional integration and without re-work or manual coding.
4. It’s built for hybrid integration use cases – as SaaS adoption increases and gains greater acceptance in IT organizations, enterprises require modern integration processes that offer multiple solutions for different scenarios. These scenarios are: cloud to cloud, cloud to ground, ground to ground and hybrid (cloud to cloud and ground).
5. It’s a multi-tenant, software-defined cloud service – the primary concept of software-defined networking (SDN) is “the decoupling of the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane). The SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform is architected on these SDN concept; the “control plane” controls where and how data is process based on user configuration and preferences, while the “data plane” (aka the Snaplex) does that actual processing of data as per instructions received from the control place. You can learn more about our software-defined integration here.
6. It’s built to scale out elastically – one of the requirements of a modern iPaaS is elastic scale capabilities, and SnapLogic has built-in smarts to automatically scale the Snaplex out and in to handlevariable traffic loads.
7. The UX is designed for citizen integrators – our Summer 2014 release refines and improves the HTML5, cloud-based user interface for both advanced users and ?citizen integrators? who require maximum ease of use and self-service. As our UX team says about designing the SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform, “it wasn’t enough to simply round the corners of an icon – we needed to rethink and rebuild the technology.”

For more on the SnapLogic Elastic Integration Platform, check out the slides below, and read a recent roundup of our top 5 elastic iPaaS architecture posts.