Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Google Data Studio, its free business intelligence (BI) product, and Cloud Dataprep, a fully-managed data preparation product, powered by Trifacta.
The offerings were announced in a blog post by Sudhir Hasbe, director, Product Management, Google Cloud Platform; and Fausto Ibarra, director, Product Management, Google Marketing Platform
“When we launched Data Studio in 2016, we set out to build a simple-to-use but powerful business intelligence (BI) platform to make visual analytics more accessible. With Data Studio, you can easily access and analyze data from Google Cloud and Google Marketing Platform sources alongside more than 500 other data sources via more than 100 partner-built connectors,” they wrote. “This means you can visualize and interactively explore data in compelling dashboards or reports, easily share insights with others or collaborate in real-time with colleagues, whether you’re sitting across the room or across continents. As a result, it’s now being used by over a million people around the world, every single month.”
In public beta for 2 years, Data Studio has been used in retail, financial services and insurance, marketing, technology, hospitality, media, and other verticals.
In addition to popular Google Cloud data sources like BigQuery, Sheets, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Storage, Data Studio works with Google advertising and marketing data sources such as Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, YouTube Analytics, and Google Ads. Organizations can also access to over 500 data sources such as Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, and more, through a community connectors partner ecosystem.
Hasbe and Ibarra also note that a custom report template gallery helps users get started quickly, offering filter-like controls for the data source they are interested in. Google Cloud also plans to launch a new community feature to support custom visualizations, allowing users to build their own visualizations for Data Studio using third party libraries such as D3.js or custom JavaScript and CSS.
Also now generally available is Google Cloud Dataprep which aims to make data preparation easier and faster through an intuitive and serverless visual interface.
Cloud Dataprep offers features frequently requested by the Google Cloud user community to make it easier to do the core tasks involved in data preparation--such as exploring, cleaning, and enriching data--with team-based data preparation and features for business analysts.
More information is available about Cloud Dataprep in the release notes, and about Data Studio here.