Whenever I’m asked where the big investment opportunities exist in technology (and believe me – it’s a question I get asked very often), I always point people in the direction of companies whose product or services straddle a variety of areas – multi cloud infrastructure management, multi platform PaaS toolkits, multi vendor social tools to name a few examples. Another hot area is that of application integration. As we move towards a world where more and more organizations are using a plethora of different applications, any platforms designed to integrate those different applications together is a fairly safe bet. Case in SnapLogic (more on them here) who sells a platform where both cloud and on-premise applications can be tied together via standard or customized “snaps” or integration blocks. It’s a big opportunity space, and one which SnapLogic is doing some interesting things in.

The VCs would seem to agree since SnapLogic is this morning announcing a further $20M in funding from new investors Ignition Partners and Triangle Peak Partners and existing investor the venerable Andreeson Horowitz. The funding makes a total of $32.5M raised so far. Alongside the funding, SnapLogic is crowing about its marketplace success with some major enterprise customers on board alongside the US federal government.

I like what SnapLogic is doing, but believe it only solves half of the pain area for organizations – while integration is a big problem area, so too is the cognitive dissonance caused by having so many different user interfaces and user experience approaches – this is the next big area of opportunity and one which I hope SnapLogic will have a look at with this newfound treasure chest.