Looker Adds Application Marketplace and Multi-Cloud Hosting to Looker 7
Looker has announced the newest version of its flagship BI and data analytics platform, Looker 7. The unveiling took place at the company’s annual user conference JOIN 2019. The release is highlighted by the addition of customizable data experiences into common tools and workflows. Looker 7 features a new development framework for building data experiences inside and outside the platform, out-of-the-box BI experiences to drive collaboration and data flows, and enterprise security, hosting and management capabilities.
The developer framework enables developers to embed data experiences anywhere by using pre-built components that ensure the experiences fit naturally in Looker. A new in-product Marketplace contains a collection of applications, integrations, plug-ins, data sources and custom visualizations built by the Looker developer ecosystem as well. There are also new SDKs to make Looker’s core APIs more approachable to developers in the languages they prefer (Typescript/Javascript, R, Python, Kotlin, Swift).
Looker 7 offers enhanced user interfaces to better align with the self-service community. Customers can now create and share content with ease via configurable filtering options like cross-filtering and custom range finders. A new closed-loop Slack integration enables users to deliver insights from Looker directly into Slack conversations and projects including automatic alerts and instant sharing.
The product’s vendor-managed connection feature connects 45+ data sources to the raw data sources in Looker. There are also a range of choices for multi-cloud hosting that use best-of-breed application management powered by kubernetes. A new system analytics feature provides metrics that administrators can use to quickly analyze user behavior, product adoption, and performance issues.
In a press statement, the company’s CEO Frank Bien said of the release: “Companies are expanding how they use data by no longer thinking of it solely as something that is analyzed and then displayed on a dashboard, but by making its use operational across a myriad of job functions, from revenue optimization to product development. This shift in thinking is resulting in companies choosing solutions that support a variety of ways to harness data — data experiences — to fuel everyday business processes. BI doesn’t just let us know what happened yesterday, but becomes how we work today.”
New Looker 7 features will be available in January. Looker was acquired by Google for $2.6 billion in June.