The first of two stops of the SnapLogic Integreat Tour, an in-person event, took place in beautiful downtown San Francisco on October 3. Internally, we abbreviate the Integreat Tour as IGT. However, after last week’s event, it now may be a.k.a. SnapLogic IGT, an immersive, good time.
It was an exciting day of learning, training, and innovating, as well as absorbing knowledge from trailblazing SnapLogic practitioners. Without doubt, many attendees found themselves rethinking what’s possible with SnapLogic.
The day kick-started with a two hour and fifteen-minute certification workshop that outlined the art of what’s possible with enterprise data orchestration and achieving managed self-service at scale. Highlights of the workshop included a reference operating framework, courtesy of Schneider Electric, for administering and governing an enterprise-wide self-service program.
Led by SnapLogic experts, the workshop also included hands-on product experiences with SnapLogic Designer, Patterns, AutoSync, and SnapGPT – the headliner, new technology for the day.
Besides learning from a proven, reference operating model for managed self-service and learning the technology, the other goal of the workshop was to demonstrate how technology enablers can empower non-technical users.
In fact, I thought the quote of the day came from a workshop participant, “you guys are cheating,” said the participant. When I asked what he meant, the workshop participant replied back, “it shouldn’t be this easy!”
We all had a good laugh with that statement.
Executive keynotes
After the managed self-service workshop, SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon formally opened the Integreat event with his keynote, where he shared his vision for business transformation through SnapLogic’s game-changing SnapGPT technology. Gaurav went on to emphasize SnapLogic’s 7-year head start and how SnapLogic is delivering while others are promising.
Supporting Garauv’s vision and providing evidence of SnapGPT’s impact was Marrah Arenas, integration developer, with Barnard College, from a video replay at SnapGPT launch. “Here it is, I can export this pipeline and import it into our SnapLogic development environment here at Barnard,” indicated Marrah. “SnapGPT provided the answer in less than two minutes. I made only a few changes and [the result] is fairly similar to what we are trying to accomplish. Now I have a functioning pipeline that I can start working with immediately.”
“SnapGPT provided the answer in less than two minutes. I made only a few changes and [the result] is fairly similar to what we are trying to accomplish. Now I have a functioning pipeline that I can start working with immediately.”
Marrah Arenas, Barnard College
Following Gaurav’s CEO keynote, Chief Technology Officer Jeremiah Stone took the stage for his CTO keynote and mapped how SnapGPT and Large Language Models (LLM) accelerate productivity for all users. He also challenged all to think ‘what if’ and imagine the future today– where you are asked to complete an integration task, with no prior experience with how to get it done, but yet with SnapLogic SnapGPT you complete the project in an accelerated manner.
With a nod to the SnapLogic IGT theme, “Prompting the Future with Generative Integration,” and to the famous Back to the Future movie Delorean prop situated at the SnapLogic IGT event entrance, Jeremiah Stone stressed, “We all have wondered if there’s a way to take that moment of process and promise, and dream and hop into a time machine and just skip over all the ripples in the landscape and get there and get there faster,” Stone said. “Because we can always describe the world we want to live in, however, knowing how to build it, knowing how to connect things together, and knowing if our team members could is the challenge and is our what if.”
Customer spotlight: Workday and Yamaha–Modernizing IT
The modernization of IT is a complex and ongoing process. However, Workday and Yamaha are two companies that are leading the way in this area. By investing in new technologies and adopting new ways of working, these companies are improving their competitiveness and better serving their customers.
Murali Rathnam, VP of IT Infrastructure, with Workday and Matt Irey, VP of IT, Yamaha Corporation of America sat down with Jeremiah Stone for an executive fireside chat on the topic of elevating your strategy on IT investment and digital transformation. These leaders of multinational companies shared their insights and drilled into building compelling business cases for IT investments and on how they each approached digital transformation. Much was said regarding how the versatile capabilities of SnapLogic helped to address evolving business needs and how SnapLogic was a strategic fit.
Workday and Yamaha on Artificial Intelligence
Workday has been using AI and ML to automate tasks, such as employee onboarding and performance reviews. The company has also been using these technologies to improve decision-making, such as predicting employee turnover.
Yamaha has been using AI and ML to personalize customer experiences. For example, the company is using these technologies to recommend products to customers based on their past purchases.
Both Workday and Yamaha are committed to continuous improvement. They are constantly looking for new ways to modernize their IT infrastructure and improve their operations.
Customer spotlight: Voya Financial–Sparking Transformation Across the Enterprise
We were thrilled to host data analytics and data management leaders from Voya Financial, Paru Puttanna, SVP and Head of Enterprise Data Management and Prathibha Prabakaran, VP of Data & Analytics Portfolio Architecture and Strategy. Voya Financial is a major player across wealth solutions, health solutions, and investment management businesses.
Outside of the usual IT role, together, Paru and Prathibha presented their technology journey as a financial services organization. Their steps to being a data-driven organization began with platform consolidation for administration, followed by digital innovation and transformation to the cloud, and then adopting AI. They have been using SnapLogic AI-driven integration for customer engagement and personalization and now Gen AI is a new area of exploration.
They moved asset management systems to the cloud a couple years ago, now are focused on the data, which is foundational to the full technology ecosystem.
In understanding Voya’s journey to the cloud, through two company acquisitions, and with SnapLogic, Prathibha laid it out very clearly, from an architecture perspective.
They have a diversity of data and a bulk of their use cases revolve around, “Believe it or not,” Prathibha indicated, “COBOL copy book transformations and 70% of our data comes from, you know, mainframe systems.” Prathibha went on to say. “COBOL copy Books is the bread and butter for our retirement business and is quite complex. We had solved it on-prem with a lot of different tools and techniques. We were looking to simplify that whole process when we were going to the cloud.”
Through a lengthy and thorough POC, Voya arrived at a simpler solution with SnapLogic integration tied to a data lakehouse usage pattern on Databricks, allowing a fine tuned environment for their community of data scientists.
Customer spotlight: USAA–Bridging Information Gaps and Fueling Data-Driven Decisions
Next on stage was Jennifer Fite, PhD, lead technical architect with USAA (United Services Automobile Associates), a provider of insurance, banking, and other services to over 13 million men and women military members and their families.
In a moderated session, Jennifer shared a great and witty story. In her words, USAA struggled with tons of various platforms for quite a large organization that has several lines of business. The platforms have been around forever, amounting to proportionately large amounts of stuff that needed to get information in and out of. As a result, data acquisition had been complex due to the fact they were constantly looking at different platforms that don’t inherently talk to one another. These systems and applications, each of which were specialists or best-of-breed within their specific areas, had their own unique way to extract data that did not easily allow the placement of data elsewhere.
Yet USAA needed to bring together this breadth of information into a cohesive ecosystem to get a full picture of their membership, what they’re doing, and what they’re buying to determine the profiles of the membership. Further, the complexity and the service of the non-standard data movement patterns that they’ve seen, across banking and insurance, and under the watchful eyes of the U.S. government, required USAA to be cognizant of what and how they acted with data.
USAA continued to share that with SnapLogic, they were able to easily extract 300 to 500 Excel spreadsheets from Box into Snowflake using a ready-made SnapLogic template pipeline (i.e., a SnapLogic pattern) that picked up a file whenever someone upstream updated it and automatically loaded to Snowflake, to deliver insights to executive leadership.
When a third-party company had created a comparative solution to hand over the code for the visualization, they needed Box, Python, and Snowflake. Their Python scripts took them two weeks to get those files into Snowflake and then they had to re-execute it anytime somebody updated a file.
Jennifer brought a round of cheers and applause from the audience by indicating, in comparison, “The SnapLogic pipeline ran in 40 minutes, and it’s all on demand.” Said Fite, “That was really neat because the minute the file changed, it would just reload the data up into Snowflake and then the [business unit] could go on with their insights and get that information into our executive hands to make important decisions. That was really interesting.”
A jam-packed day
As I indicated starting out, SnapLogic Integreat Tour (IGT), San Francisco, was an immersive, good time for our third annual customer event.
The day rounded out with an additional afternoon breakout session on SnapGPT, hosted by our infrastructure partner AWS, where there was standing room only to see SnapGPT in action, up close.
How IT is driving business value: Raising Cane’s and Mercer
Plus, another great moderated panel/Q&A session featuring Nemi Nabiraj, Principal Lead Solutions Architect, with human resourcing firm Mercer and Garrick Fischer, Applications Engineer, with fast food chain Raising Cane’s. The topic was The New Wave of IT Heroes – Better, Faster, Stronger.
Raising Cane’s and Mercer, two companies using SnapLogic integration to drive business value, lived up to the billing. Raising Cane’s uses SnapLogic integration to connect its point-of-sale system with its supply chain management system. This allows Raising Cane’s to track inventory levels and ensure that its restaurants always have the food they need. While Mercer uses SnapLogic integration to connect its various systems, such as its applicant tracking system and its payroll system. This allows Mercer to provide a more seamless experience for its clients.
Both Raising Cane’s and Mercer shared seeing significant benefits:
- Raising Cane’s has been able to reduce its inventory costs by 10% and improve its customer satisfaction scores by 5%
- Mercer has been able to reduce its time to hire by 25% and improve its employee satisfaction scores by 10%
Generative AI for marketing technology
Completing the day was SnapLogic solution partner Credera, a global boutique management and technology consulting firm. Phil Lockhart, Partner and Chief Digital Officer with Credera along with his colleague Vincent Yates, Partner and Chief Data Scientist, officially unveiled their marketing automation platform (MAP) powered by SnapLogic SnapGPT and how it lowers barriers for marketing professionals to access the strengths of Credera’s MAP, relieving dependencies on other teams, thereby enabling broader collaboration and faster results.
If you are in London, register for our IGT event to check out the amazing Credera MAP + SnapLogic SnapGPT demo, live.
Final thoughts
As anyone in the business of putting on a customer event will tell you, it is no small undertaking. It requires all hands on deck for everyone involved. From company executive leadership on down the ranks, everyone works extremely hard with advanced planning and then execution of an event.
The efforts are all worth it when you hear the amazing stories customers and partners have to share, as was the case with our Integreat Tour event in San Francisco. Particularly gratifying to hear were the quantified positive impact that each of our customers revealed about SnapLogic’s contribution to their businesses, along with the excitement they all had for our latest AI innovation, large language model based SnapGPT– in production today!
If you were unable to attend, or would like to review or learn more about what took place at Integreat, I invite you to stay tuned as we make information available post event, to watch on demand.
For those of you in the London area on November 2, I invite you to attend the SnapLogic Integreat Tour event in person and to see and experience the SnapLogic difference first hand.
