Reinventing Business Intelligence for a Modern Data World
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overview Reinventing Business Intelligence for a Modern Data World. Changing the way you drive your business. Looker brings BI into the modern era with an adaptable platform that bridges the chasm between your complex data environment and data-hungry business users. Squarely at the center of our solution are savvy data people, who can use Looker to extend their genius throughout your organization. The Looker platform is powered by our Datafold™ Engine. Together with LookML, our extensible modeling language, they enable you to extract full value from your analytic database. A full set of modern tools equips data analysts to explain, transform, and persist aggregated views of data—right where it sits, in the analytic database—and create rich discovery experiences for inquisitive decision-makers. As a result, your business users can explore relationships in data, from the highest summaries, drilling through any level of intermediates down to high-resolution detail. This notion of “folding data”— filtering, sorting, and pivoting on the fly—empowers them to find the data they need. There’s no waiting for predetermined reports. Data is available at the moment of decision, building confidence, driving collaboration, and accelerating success in your organization. User empowerment is also about rapid deployment: Looker users can be exploring data within hours—not weeks or months. 1 Looker Fuels (and Fulfills) the Business User’s Curiosity. Discovery-driven organizations are successful because they empower Exploring and analyzing our data their entire workforce to ask questions. Whether it’s your marketing through Looker has helped us team trying to segment customer audiences or an operations manager exploring issues in capacity, they can use Looker to support their choices develop strategies to increase with hard data. charitable donations to schools. By identifying giving trends, we With Looker, an easy-to-use browsing experience opens up full BI functionality on any analytical or transactional database, from small data can better restructure and target to gigantic data, putting data discovery in the hands of the people who our fundraising. are responsible for business results. They can build and share reports, so —Charles Best, CEO other functional groups can benefit from the questions they’re asking and Donors Choose.org the knowledge they’re creating—about everything from cohort analysis, campaign attribution, and customer lifetime value to supply chain and subscription revenue models. Data discovery • Curiosity-driven experience of all your business data, from a single application • Browser-based interface and customizable dashboards, available on any device • Ability to move quickly from wide-angle to extreme detail views, and to drill down on any chart • Powerful data tools, such as pivoting, contextual filtering, sequencing, and cohort tiering • Ad hoc query-builder for exploration of any model • Wide set of visualizations, and dashboards including scatter, table, bar, and line charts Sharing and collaboration • Time- and activity-based email subscriptions • User bookmarks, shareable via URLs • Real-time integration with Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, and other business applications, including your own custom applications • Manual export in csv, text, or JSON With Looker, anyone in your organization you can access high-resolution insights. 2 Looker Extends the Value of Your Smartest Data People. Looker liberates your data analysts and data scientists from the With Looker, the people in my inefficiencies of traditional BI processes. Instead of endless cycles organization can explore the of creating reports based on (sometimes poorly conceived) user data we need more quickly and requests, they now have more valuable ways to contribute—whether focusing on in-depth lines of questioning, creating fact tables for efficiently than ever before. It’s just-in-time transformations, or directing their expertise to technical become an essential piece of product development. our data architecture. With Looker’s powerful language, LookML, your data team can build — Geoffrey Guerdat, Director of Data Engineering Gilt Groupe web-based tools for self-service exploration—essentially packaging their know-how into mini-applications that the rest of the company can use. The LookML syntax simplifies the development of complex analytical models for any organization, while enhancing the capabilities of SQL. EXTENSIBLE API SET There’s no need to expend time and resources coding queries on an ad The Looker platform includes a full web hoc basis or setting up complex BI software platforms. Your data people services API and application SDK for building custom applications for integrating can create dimensions, metrics, and additional views, set indexes, or Looker functionality into another BI workflow. incorporate new database tables—adapting analytics as quickly as your organization demands. Data modeling • Powerful LookML modeling language • Browser-based IDE for agile modeling, development, and embellishment • Support for derived tables, including persistent derived tables • GitHub integration for collaborative development by small and large analyst teams • Model generator and SQL tool for increased efficiencies and in-browser development Management and administration • In-app user management and comprehensive permissioning • Live integration with any SQL database, such as MPP, in-memory, and columnar Your data analysts can use LookML to create mini-applications systems, as well as with Hadoop via SQL that add power and efficiencies to data exploration. interfaces such as Cloudera Impala and Pivatal Hawq • Database connection management tools • Advanced monitoring of sharing and reporting activities, so data doesn’t go where it shouldn’t 3 Looker Exploits the Power of Fast New-Era Databases. The new generation of analytic database technology is all about detail. Installation and support The Looker Datafold Engine leverages this leap in analytical computing • Connections with any SQL database—such as by exploiting the capabilities of your underlying SQL database (MPP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Vertica, Redshift, columnar, or in-memory). Rather than moving data into external BI data Teradata, Google Big Query, IBM DashDB, and Pivotal/ engines or cubes, Looker abstracts and models data at query time—and Greenplum—and settings for external applications does it efficiently, in the database—providing every end user with direct • Lightweight installation—Linux, Java, and Git real-time access to the entire dataset. • Unlimited upgrades and maintenance The entire Looker platform can be distributed on our infrastructure or • Unlimited analytical support via in-application chat yours—whether managed on premise or in the cloud. It’s packaged in a lightweight .jar file (like .zip for Java apps), so implementation is fast and requires very few resources. By combining Looker with Amazon Looker partners with leading analytic database and Redshift, we get the most from our data warehousing providers. cloud infrastructure and applications: virtually unlimited scalability, affordable cost, and an intuitive end-user experience that makes it possible for all our employees to dig into our data for insights. — Daniel Mintz, Director of Business Intelligence Upworthy For a fresh look at your own data, sign up for a free Looker trial. About Looker Just tell us how to connect to your analytics Looker is an inventive software company that’s pioneering the next database, and you’ll experience the full generation of business intelligence (BI). We believe that businesses can only thrive when data is consistently defined and easily accessible Looker functionality free of charge. across the entire organization. Our web-based platform powers the work of data analysts while fueling Try Looker for free. (and fulfilling) the business user’s curiosity. Looker is creating true Or schedule a demo discovery-driven businesses and unlocking the value of their data, at: looker.com/free-trial one customer at a time. Looker is based in Santa Cruz, CA | looker.com © 2014 Looker. All rights reserved. Looker and the Looker logo are trademarks of Looker Data Sciences, registered in the United States. Other trademarks are trademarks of their respective companies. All services 4 are subject to change or discontinuance without notice. November 2014.