Looker Unveils New 'Self-Service' Big Data Analytics Platform

"Curated data" and a delivering "single source of truth" are at the core of next-generation business intelligence and data analytics. That's the message from Looker in the new version of its data exploration platform, which focuses on allowing enterprises to identify and analyze the data that is most relevant to them.

The way Looker sees it, there is a "massive disconnect between Big Data and business value," because "organizations continue to dumb-down BI and spoon-feed users with summarized datasets, instead of gratifying them with creative analytic tools that leverage their interest and capacity to manipulate data in interesting ways."

The solution for truly deriving value from data, Looker said, is to make it simpler for users of business intelligence platforms to explore their data in a flexible way, to home in on the information that is most relevant to their needs. That is what the new version of Looker's platform, which the company released May 19, aims to do.

The software does that in three main ways, according to the company. First, it provides an in-browser environment that allows users to "create a self-service BI environment that’s customized to their business, with a modeling layer as the single source of truth. … In this way, analysts act as the curators of the company’s datasets, managing the data environment rather than guessing at the information business users will require."

The Looker business analytics platform now also delivers new types of data visualizations. These include a set of pre-fabricated charts and graphs based on the D3 library, as well as tools that allow data analysts to build their own visualizations.

Last but not least, the new version of Looker offers better integration with Big Data databases, such as HP Vertica (HPQ), Teradata Aster and Oracle (ORCL), along with LDAP support and two-factor authentication to provide enterprises with more control over access to data.

The guiding principle behind all of these changes, according to Looker CEO Frank Bien, is creating "a new kind of self-service data experience. With Looker, data analysts can create self-service discovery experiences that empower business users to explore and manipulate large, complex datasets and be assured the data accessing is the single source of the truth. As a result, employees can create their own views of data for further visualization and discovery in real time."