Case Study

Spirent Modernizes Integration, Cuts Costs, and Activates GenAI With SnapLogic’s Unified Platform

Company Background

Spirent is a global provider of automated test and assurance solutions for networks, cybersecurity, and positioning. They provide innovative products, services, and managed solutions that address the test, assurance, and automation challenges of a new generation of technologies, including 5G, edge computing, cloud, autonomous vehicles, and beyond.

Challenges

Integration complexity

Spirent was using two separate platforms for integration: one for data, and another for applications and APIs. The legacy integration systems and user interfaces were complex and not intuitive, and consumption-based pricing was compounding costs rather than saving them (making scalability challenging).

Inefficient processes

The competitive intelligence team spent around 8 hours each week browsing through daily Google alerts for target accounts, competitors, and industry trends and adding the summaries to Salesforce for their sales teams to leverage. They tried automating the process within other commercially available systems but found it prohibitively expensive to build.

Outdated systems

Spirent had an outdated ERP that consistently required integration support using legacy ETL tools.

Applying GenAI

Intending to incorporate GenAI into their enterprise strategies, Spirent’s IT leadership had begun exploring the capabilities of ChatGPT Enterprise, AWS Bedrock, Llama, and OpenAI but had use cases for leveraging AI via APIs (outside of the traditional chat interface).

The Solution

Having implemented the SnapLogic platform successfully with a previous organization, Spirent’s VP of Enterprise Technology, Matt Bostrom and CIO, Chris Francosky, were confident it was the right choice for their needs. 

Matt said, “We compared many of the leading integration platforms and found SnapLogic to be the easiest to use. Other tools have different on-prem versions for each capability. We were spending huge amounts annually just to upgrade and maintain those platforms.”

A standout benefit of SnapLogic’s unified application and data integration platform was a suite of AI-driven enhancement tools, including:

• SnapGPT, a generative integration co-pilot for building and configuring pipelines with conversational prompts in minutes
• AgentCreator, a robust mechanism for creating LLM-based, automated applications, assistants and agents

Along with a simpler, cost-effective way to move and manage data, the added benefit of GenAI-ready integration and GenAI-enabling capabilities could help Spirent start actively using LLMs to elevate internal processes. SnapLogic became the critical “orchestration” layer for leveraging LLM APIs and performing actions if needed post the response. First on the list: build a seamless, internal sales intelligence tool to deliver pre-synthesized, summarized customer and competitive information for the competitive intelligence and sales teams.

Spirent took measured steps to adopt SnapLogic’s platform, testing with individual reps, collecting feedback, and then setting a plan for full implementation.

Business Results

Within a week from deployment, the pre-sales assistant application was up and running — summarizing competitive articles and feeding pertinent details into the live instance of SFDC for 200 sales representatives. In addition to gaining quick access to actionable intelligence, the Spirent team has uncovered several benefits since onboarding SnapLogic.

• Applications/efficiencies are cross-functional, from competitive intelligence and business analysts to sales
• Opportunity to streamline tech stack by an order of magnitude with the ability to build GenAI applications in-house rather than acquire multiple licenses and tools
• Automate a manual process that took 8 or more hours each week scanning articles for competitive and industry intelligence, writing a synopsis with relevant, up-to-date information according to business unit, and communicating to sales via CRM 
• By using SnapLogic AgentCreator, Spirent is expecting to save $144,000/year in AI user subscription fees by consolidating LLM usage to a single app using API costs compared to a per-user basis 
• Spirent can save 50% of development time and cost by reusing GenAI application patterns they already built within SnapLogic, in turn significantly reducing time to market 
• Can effectively maintain data security and privacy controls across inputs and sources

Bonus Points

• Bulk data transfer
• Centralized platform
• No proprietary code required
• Ready-made connectors (Snaps) for all major systems, plus LLMs and vector databases
• Reusability with pipelines for different outputs

Future Use Cases

The Spirent team continues to uncover use cases for AgentCreator. Expanding on competitive intelligence, they want to create an interactive “agent” for sales reps to communicate with within their existing applications (and not having to pay a premium on various co-pilot licensing fees with minimum seat restrictions now being offered by most SaaS companies). 

Plans are also taking shape for a meeting summarizer, to review transcripts, apply sentiment analysis, and based on the nature of the call, log relevant notes directly into Salesforce with an automated follow-up task for the appropriate internal contact as well as a Record Analyzer that is available for a user to click a button and get instant updates about the record they are currently viewing in their CRM.