Cooperative Benefits Group Builds IT Infrastructure on SnapLogic in Four Months

Low-code techniques and AI continues to push the power of iPaaS to deliver easy and enterprise-scale integration. IDN looks at how a small pharmacy benefits startup used SnapLogic to build 100 integration pipelines in only four months.

by Brenda Fox

Tags: API, citizen developer cloud integration, ETL/ELT, iPaaS, low-code, SnapLogic,

A low-code, integration platform as a service offering from SnapLogic has helped Cooperative Benefits Group, a benefits management startup, build and deploy their integration-heavy enterprise infrastructure in under four months. 

 

CBG provides pharmacy benefit management (PBM) and clinical pharmacy services to businesses. With SnapLogic, CBG designed, built and deployed an entire IT infrastructure to connect more than 30 systems and applications within four months. 

 

“Building and scaling any new startup – in a pandemic no less – is not for the faint of heart,” said Mark Fowler, CBG’s CIO. “We needed to build a resilient, secure, and scalable enterprise infrastructure, all with a lean IT team, on a limited budget, and against aggressive deadlines. We knew we needed to rely on intelligent, low-code tools and flexible, committed partners.”

 

Fowler and his team listed several “must-have” criteria for their iPaaS, included:

  • Core ETL/ELT capability
  • Quick to learn
  • Low/no code for citizen development
  • API connectivity
  • CI/CD friendly – support for Infrastructure as Code
  • Advanced data features (AI, ML, big data)
  • Automation capacity
  • Enterprise security already baked in and
  • Cloud services and NoOps (also known as ‘no operations’)

The SnapLogic iPaaS met these criteria, and with it, a small CBG team was able to design and deliver some 100 integration pipelines. These were needed to move gigabytes of data daily to support HIPAA-compliant patient eligibility and claims processes, CBG execs said. 

 

CBG’s Davis Hansen, senior data and integration engineer, shared how SnapLogic’s ‘lean’ approach to integration offered speed and accuracy – with minimal staff and budget.  

 

“The beauty of SnapLogic is its low-code simplicity and breadth of capability,” Hansen said in a statement. “With zero training on a trial account, in one day I was able to create an end-to-end pipeline.” 

 

Ultimately, the CBG team was able to deliver the broad array of integrations the company needed. “We were able to build out an entire IT infrastructure with one data architect managing it on weekends. SnapLogic let us avoid having to recruit, train, and ramp up a full team which was critical to us as a new startup. We were able to do 95% of this with a one-person team in about three months. This process would have taken a much larger team at least 18 months with any other tool,” Hansen added. 

 

The SnapLogic Intelligent Integration platform provides an extensible platform for comprehensive integration, with various technologies that support a wide array of stakeholders – including highly-skilled integration specialists and less technical “citizen integrators” and ad-hoc integrators. 

 

“CBG is a testament to what a small but mighty team can do when they leverage the power of low-code and automation,” said George Mogannam, CRO at SnapLogic. “SnapLogic can do so much more than just data and application integrations, as CBG has discovered through their curiosity, exploration, and entrepreneurial spirit. We’re proud to be part of the core infrastructure of this company and look forward to their continued success.”

SnapLogic’s Low-Code / No-Code Approach to Cloud Integration

SnapLogic’s low-code/no-code platform is architected to promote a fast path to accomplishing the integration-focused digital transformation.

Notable features include:

An HTML5 visual designer.  This makes it simple for non-technical users, citizen integrators and integration specialists to “snap together” integrations in hours without coding. Snaps provide a level of abstraction over an application endpoint, providing a click-not-code approach to pipeline assembly.

 

AI-driven recommendation engine. The Iris AI has a repository of popular integration patterns, which promote self-service by recommending flows with up to 90-percent accuracy. The AI can also “learn” new and customized patterns. 

 

Support for integrations to legacy apps and resources.  Using optional deep-dive, hand-coding integration techniques, SnapLogic supports complex transformations, conditional operations, triggers, parameterization, aggregation, and reuse. 

 

Scale and speed. With processing capabilities exceeding 1.4 billion transactions per hour.

 

Built-in governance, security, and monitoring. This rich support delivers 99% uptime. Under the coves, SnapLogic supports centralized object-level, granular security. It also monitors a variety of permissions-based tasks, user activity, and endpoint utilization monitoring.

CBG’s Hansen also described how SnapLogic’s deep set of low-code integration services was crucial to delivering the project in only four months.  None of the other tools were able to do that,” Hansen said. “SnapLogic met all of our criteria for what we wanted in a solution.”

 

Since the rollout of its integration infrastructure and pipelines, CBG has expanded its use cases for SnapLogic. These include APIs, CI/CD automation and even a set of conversational bots for their service team to use in Microsoft Teams. In this latter case, SnapLogic acts as the bot logic.

 

“Thanks to SnapLogic, we are able to test new ideas and scale out all our core areas of IT to support our fast growing company and we look forward to accelerate our business even further,” CBG CIO Fowler noted. 




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