Google has unified all its business intelligence tools under the Looker brand, it announced at Cloud Next 2022, its virtual user’s conference.
Looker will now be the face of all existing Google Cloud data analytics programs. These programs will be included in the Looker Suite and bear the Looker name. For example, Data Studio is now Looker Studio.
“Looker is the name you’ll hear us use when talking about all of our Google Cloud business intelligence products, as we bring together Looker, Data Studio, and core Google technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Kate Wright, Google’s Senior Director for Business Intelligence Product Management said in the announcement.
Looker Suite Includes Integrated Cloud Infrastructure Services
Looker is being launched in Cloud Preview today. The new version will include integrated core cloud infrastructure services, including key security and management services.
Google is also launching a preview of Looker integration with Google Sheets. It plans to eventually support visualization tools like Salesforce’s Tableau as well.
This continues the integration trend Google has followed since acquiring Looker in 2020 for $2.6 billion. Shortly thereafter, the search engine giant began offering full support for the Google Marketing Analytics Suite.
Google Seeking To Enhance Business Intelligence Offerings
The acquisition of Looker significantly enhanced Google’s analytics and business intelligence capabilities. A key part of this was Looker’s semantic data modeling capability, which allows developers to define data and analytics assets to ensure consistent interpretations.
By combining all its analytics offerings under one umbrella, Google seeks to provide users with more functionality than traditional dashboards.
Looker Studio will now support data models from Looker, allowing users to apply the Looker modeling layer to combine data sources. Overall, this unification seeks to allow companies to bring more data into their workflows and applications, so they can make better informed day-to-day decisions about operations.
Earlier this year, Google launched BigLake and integrated Analytics Hub and BigQueryML into its cloud platform. At the time, Looker was not mentioned.
Looker Studio Pro Adds Enterprise Management Features
Looker Studio will now be available in three tiers, including Looker Studio Pro, which is intended for more advanced users at an enterprise level. This adds additional management features, collaboration tools, and service-level agreements.
Google plans to integrate the enterprise version with Dataplex, a data management environment in the future that enables data lineage and metadata visibility.
The features included in Looker Studio Pro are specifically intended for use by large organizations with many employees.
Featured image: Shutterstock/Sergei Elagin
