Introducing the next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform

As consumers, we all benefit from unprecedented access to data in everything we do, from finding answers on the web to navigating a new city to picking the best place to eat dinner. But at work it’s not that easy. Instead of having answers to questions at our fingertips, getting those answers is a costly IT project away—and when we get the answers, they only raise new questions that you then need to get back into the IT queue to answer. 

Just as Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, Looker aims to do the same for your business data, making it easy for users to get insights, and for you to build insight-powered applications. That vision is our north star for business intelligence at Google Cloud, which is why we acquired Looker in 2020, and why we have big plans for the next few years. 

Today, we are unifying our business intelligence product family under the Looker umbrella. Looker is the name you’ll hear us use when talking about our Google Cloud business intelligence products, as we bring together Looker, Data Studio, and core Google technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). And starting today, Data Studio is now Looker Studio. With this complete enterprise business intelligence suite, we will help you go beyond dashboards and infuse your workflows and applications with the intelligence needed to help make data-driven decisions.

Expanding the power and reach of Looker

Looker Studio helps make it easy for everyone to do self-service analytics. It currently supports more than 800 data sources with a catalog surpassing 600 connectors, making it simple to explore data from different sources with just a few clicks, and without ever needing IT. In addition to the functionality customers already know and love, Looker Studio plans to evolve to include a complete user interface for working with data modeled in Looker. 

As a first step on this journey, we are happy to announce that access to Looker data models from Looker Studio is available in preview today. This capability allows customers to explore trusted data via the Looker modeling layer. For the first time, customers can easily combine both self-service analytics from ad-hoc data sources and trusted data that has already been vetted and modeled in Looker.

We love what our users have accomplished with Looker Studio, from tracking NBA MVP Award votes and the location of the International Space Station, to breaking down the pumpkin spice economy and the video gaming industry. To support these vast and diverse use cases, we will continue to make Looker Studio available at no cost. At the same time, many of our customers require enterprise-focused features to use Looker Studio as part of their data stack while also addressing their governance and compliance requirements. To meet this customer demand, we are pleased to announce the availability of Looker Studio Pro. 

Customers who upgrade to Looker Studio Pro will get new enterprise management features, team collaboration capabilities, and SLAs. This is only the first release, and we’ve developed a roadmap of capabilities, starting with Dataplex integration for data lineage and metadata visibility, that our enterprise customers have been asking for. 

When Looker joined Google Cloud, one of the primary goals was to bring business intelligence closer to core Google Cloud technologies. As a major step on that journey, we are pleased to announce Looker (Google Cloud core) in preview today. This new version of Looker will be available in the Google Cloud Console and is deeply integrated with core cloud infrastructure services, such as key security and management services. 

Open data means open business intelligence, too

Insights everywhere doesn’t just mean everywhere in Looker. Our customers want an open data cloud that breaks down silos, whether that’s analytics, business intelligence, or machine learning. Just as we’ve already done with our BigQuery data warehouse, we are committed to integrating Looker with as many Google and partner products as our customers need. 

For example, we are deeply integrating Looker and Google Workspace so insights are available in the familiar productivity tools you use every day. This will provide easy access, via spreadsheets and other documents, to consistent, trusted answers from curated data sources across your organization. Looker integration with Google Sheets is in preview now, with plans for full release in the first half of 2023. 

To continue to meet our customers where they are in their open data cloud journey, we are working to connect other popular business intelligence offerings as well. That connection can allow visualization tools, including Tableau and Power BI, to easily analyze trusted data from Looker. Additionally, Looker continues to be an open platform, and we are expanding our partnerships from the modeling layer right into the user experience.

To demonstrate that, we are also pleased to announce a new partnership with Sisu Data. Often, your data will tell you when something unusual has happened, but finding out why can take hours or days, even for skilled data scientists. Our partnership with Sisu Data will help automate finding root causes 80% faster than traditional approaches. This deep integration will enable a smooth experience for more customers.

Real data, real intelligence, real impact

Our customers use Looker for both internal business intelligence and to create embedded data products. Mercado Libre, a retailer in Latin America with a geographically diverse workforce, uses Looker and BigQuery to enable accelerated fulfillment. In the first half of 2022 alone, they were able to deliver 79% of shipments in less than 48 hours. 

Another customer, Wpromote, is one of Adweek’s fastest growing digital marketing agencies. They rebuilt the infrastructure they use to run every aspect of their business using Looker and BigQuery. “We wanted to build a system with no ceiling, where the only limitation would be our vision and our ability to execute,” Wpromote Chief Technology Officer Paul Dumais said. “Everything that you can do from the Looker UI can be done via API.”

So much of our everyday lives revolve around data, and that’s especially true when it comes to the way we work. Data provides us with a wealth of knowledge, but without the right tools, sometimes it can be overwhelming, expensive, and can take far too long. The new, unified Looker product family helps you make the most of your data, delivering a better experience for your teams and, ultimately, a better experience for your customers — today and long into the future. Over 10 million users already access the Looker family of products, including Looker Studio, each month. Join them in making insights more accessible across your organization.

To learn more about our other advances and announcements in the data cloud announcements, you can read more here on the Google Cloud Blog.