Today at JOIN 2019, Looker’s annual three-day conference for data professionals, the company announced Looker 7, its next-generation, enterprise-grade data platform.
Looker 7 transcends traditional business intelligence (BI) by infusing customisable data experiences into day-to-day tools and workflows to further close the gap between discovering insights and taking action.
“Companies are expanding how they use data by no longer thinking of it solely as something that is analysed and then displayed on a dashboard, but by making its use operational across myriad job functions, from revenue optimisation to product development,” said Frank Bien, CEO of Looker.
“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.”
Looker 7
Looker 7 delivers new enhancements in three key areas: a new development framework for building powerful data experiences within and outside of Looker; re-imagined BI experiences out-of-the-box that improve collaboration and data flow across common business tools; and enterprise-class security, hosting and management features to support the most demanding workloads.
Build and Deploy data experiences in powerful new ways
A development framework that lets developers customise data experiences within Looker, and embed those experiences anywhere. Developers can use pre-built components that ensure these custom data experiences fit naturally in Looker. This combination unlocks powerful new ways to extend the Looker platform.
To quickly find and deploy add-ons, Looker 7 includes an in-product Marketplace, which contains an ever-growing collection of applications, integrations, plug-ins, templates, data sources and custom visualisations built by the Looker developer ecosystem.
To help developers build these custom data experiences faster, Looker 7 includes a suite of developer tools that make it even easier to build with Looker. These new developer tools include:
- New SDKs to make Looker’s core APIs more approachable to developers in the languages they prefer. These include Typescript / Javascript, R, Python, Kotlin and Swift, along with a SDK Codegen to generate SDKs in additional languages.
- A Developer Portal to provide developers with a centralised location for all the best Looker development tools and documentation. These resources serve a wide spectrum of developer needs to support a greater diversity of skill levels, timelines and projects.
"A lot of our work centres on building custom data experiences, which the new extension framework enables us to do incredibly fast: we built an application in less than two weeks!" said Nick Fogler, CEO and founder of 4Mile Analytics.
"The launch of Marketplace is also a really important business opportunity for partners like us because we get to distribute our solutions to all of Looker's customers. Overall, the revamped developer experience coming out of Looker 7 demonstrates Looker's deep commitment to ensuring the success of its partners.”
Reimagined BI experience out-of-the-box
Looker 7 is re-imagining dashboards by introducing enhanced user interfaces for greater self-service and interactivity. Looker customers can now create and share content in more intuitive ways, including configurable filtering options such as cross-filtering, custom range finders and more. By delivering data in these new dashboard templates, Looker has created a dynamic reporting environment and mobile-first experience.
Make better data-driven decisions within real-time Slack conversations with the new closed-loop Slack integration. It delivers data insights from Looker directly into Slack conversations and projects, including automatic alerts and instant sharing.
Send trusted data when it’s needed to where it’s needed with new third-party integrations for Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Auger.ai, mParticle, Matik and Spiff.com.
Customers can use the new analytical alert feature to be automatically notified of important changes in their data via Slack, e-mail, text or wherever they choose.
Looker 7 has new SQL runner visualisations for data analysts wanting to understand raw data on-the-fly that allow raw SQL queries to be quickly displayed in charts and graphs.
"Looker's new alert feature enables RPM to communicate operational KPIs to our management team in real-time,” said Andrew Farage, co-founder and COO of RPM, a national hospitality and entertainment brand focused on high-speed go-karting. “We manage hundreds of high-performance go-karts, running millions of races per year. Real-time alerts trigger variance data to our mechanics and operational leads, ensuring that each kart in our fleet is cycled equally. In our large-format hospitality environment, some of our most valuable data is invisible. Looker alerts serve up key operational insights that would otherwise go unnoticed.”
Built for enterprise-grade workloads
For organisations that rely on data and analytics to power their business, Looker 7 provides a robust, secure, enterprise-class platform with expanded options for multi-cloud hosting, managing and seamlessly connecting to data. These include the following:
- To go from data to insights even faster, Looker 7 brings a new connections feature that connects 45+ data sources to the raw data sources in Looker. This Looker-managed data integration and database solution allows customers to quickly go from siloed SaaS tools to unified insights seamlessly.
- A range of choices for multi-cloud hosting is made possible in Looker 7 using best-of-breed application management powered by Kubernetes, including managed hosting in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Azure clouds.
- Providing administrators with new insights into their users and how Looker is performing though system activity analytics. With Looker system activity analytics, administrators can quickly analyse user behaviour, adoption of data products, or performance issues. In Looker 7, activity data can be joined with other types of data to help control cloud infrastructure costs and data adoption.
Continuing to achieve the security certifications of greatest significance to its customers, Looker recently achieved ISO 27001, PCI, and SOC 2 Type I (GCP) certifications, in addition to maintaining its SOC 2 Type II (AWS) and HIPAA Security Rule mapping.
Providing an exceptional support experience, Looker 7 launches two new programs. Premier Success is now available to provide additional assistance when there may be staffing constraints, a need for technical skills, when consultation is needed on a new feature and to reduce deployment and adoption risk. Additionally, an expanded Technical Success Manager (TSM) offering is available to provide customers with a technical partner and consultant on-site that is a dedicated, skilled resource for delivering analytical value.
Availability
Looker 7 features will begin being rolled out in January 2020.
Learn more:
Learn more about Looker 7 HERE
Read more about Looker 7 in this blog: Making Data Experiences a Reality
Learn more about how Looker 7 for developers in this blog: Empowering Developers to Create Powerful Custom Data Experiences
Hear more about Looker 7 in a webinar on Wednesday, 20 November
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