Looker plans to release a new version of its flagship data platform that offers data analytics and business insights to every department and integrates into applications to get data directly into the decision-making process. Looker 5 will roll out to customers in October 2017.
Among the key innovations in Looker 5 is the ability to simplify daily workflows by letting anyone interact with Zendesk, Salesforce, Adwords and more with the Action Hub. The new release also provides purpose-built Applications by Looker, and improves the user experience with new Viz Blocks for visualizations, and Data Blocks to add valuable public data to any analysis.
Key to the new release are:
- The Action Hub, which allows users to take action on insights directly from within Looker. Integrations in the Hub allow users to actions like changing the status on Zendesk support tickets, shipping reports and dashboards to Google Drive or Box, or pausing an underperforming Adwords campaign. The Action Hub will launch with direct built-in connections to these services as well as hundreds more through middleware tools like Zapier and Segment.
- New Looker Block types include Viz Blocks which provide 10 new visualization types (with more coming soon) and the ability to create any other custom visualization users can dream up; Data Tools that give end users highly curated analytic experiences (e.g. a Google Analytics-like Web Analytics tool); and Data Blocks that make it simple for customers to join their data with pre-modeled external datasets like weather data or demographic data.
- Applications built on the Looker Data Platform leverage all Looker’s capabilities to access, analyze and take action with data. The first three offerings will be Marketing Analytics by Looker, IT Operations Analytics by Looker and Event Analytics by Looker. These department-specific, plug-in-play solutions give people data and analysis they need, as well as the ability to take real action, all in a simple interface and built on the same platform as Looker’s best-in-class BI tool.
Additional features is Looker include:
- Data Merge which merges results from two or more disparate datasets, even if that data lives in different databases, helping customers examine time-series data, geographic data, and other summary data from multiple sources in a single interface.
- Druid Support which helps organizations quickly ingest massive quantities of event data in Druid and use Looker to run low-latency queries on top of the data.
- 57 new statistical functions that make it easier for Looker users to run statistical tests, compare distributions with their data and reshape their data as needed.
- SQL Runner Visualizations that allows technical users to search, sort, save, and visualize their data directly in Looker’s SQL Runner.