13 ms·

Google to Acquire Looker

360 points by rohit6223 7y ago

rohit6223 7y ago
https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/ https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/
outside1234 7y ago
Hopefully Google starts a campus in the Santa Cruz area off the back of this...
- jrowley 7y ago
  That would definitely help Santa Cruz’s rental market
  - mc32 7y ago
    It would definitely revitalize the coast. But at what price? Can you imagine the gridlock on State Highway 17 (and the Pac HWY)? If I sat in the governator’s office, I’d push for a commuter line from the South Bay to St Cruz. That would be so much more beneficial than the HSR to no-where we wasted 70 billion on.
    - jrowley 7y ago
      I can only imagine the ecological and financial challenges of putting rail in over the Santa Cruz mountains but would love to see it
      - wbl 7y ago
        We already did it, then abandoned the line.
      - outside1234 7y ago
        Ecological challenges - is it really ecologically challenging to put a tunnel into a mountain versus thousands of cars driving to Silicon Valley every morning. Financial Challenges - please. We have so much money in this state and it is just squandered on so many unneeded things (like the high speed rail line in the central valley).
    - outside1234 7y ago
      It is too obviously a great strategy to put in rail between San Jose Diridon, Los Gatos, and Santa Cruz, so let's build rail in the middle of nowhere instead. There is even an abandoned tunnel under the mountain that did this in the early 1900s!
      - mc32 7y ago
        Thanks for reminding me of that. I thought there had been but wasn't sure if it went all along HWY 17. Apparently there was one running till the 40s.[1] But the highway killed it (not mudslides as is often attributed). There were a total of 8 tunnels most of them condemned and dynamited. But apparently the right of way exists and could be rebuilt! So there is hope if people and businesses push hard enough for it. Commuters would rejoice, SCZ would enjoy revitalization and integration into the Bay Area economy and holidaymakers would enjoy a nice leisurely trip to the beach by train --what a treat that would be! [1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/05/abandoned-railroad-tunnels-tell-tale-of-town-shift-author-talk-next-week/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/05/abandoned-railroad-tu...
        sjg007 7y ago
        Maybe a hyper loop..
        imagetic 7y ago
        I don't think anyone in Santa Cruz wants that. As a long-time Santa Cruz resident, the only people I know who want it to be more are tech people who have been pushed down here cause of shortages over the hill or just like to surf.
        lebca 7y ago
        My understanding was that apart from GM killing it on a more general statewide level, the SC dirt is really soft and the tunnels collapsed a lot more often than expected, taking deaths with them during collapses and rebuilds.
      - riku_iki 7y ago
        Santa Cruz probably doesn't have enough area for expansion to justify rail line.
    - epistasis 7y ago
      There's massive gridlock for Santa Cruz county residents commuting out to the valley for their workdays. The worst is probably between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. I know Looker to really incentivize keeping their workforce local.
  - imagetic 7y ago
    Ha. What rental market? What's left is either falling down or something only a Google employee can afford.
  - deepakhj 7y ago
    There’s plenty of apple and Netflix employees in Santa Cruz that commute over the hill. Also amazon has an office on pacific.
- rcpt 7y ago
  Yeah that bus ride is getting long
brd529 7y ago
Most looker instances I’ve seen are wired to redshift. How long until support for non google cloud databases is dropped, deprioritized, etc?
- Donald 7y ago
  Maybe this behavior will change under the scrutiny of anti-trust investigations.
- brd529 7y ago
  The looker blog post addresses this though the google one doesn’t: > For customers and partners, it’s important to know that today’s announcement solidifies ours as well as Google Cloud’s commitment to multi-cloud. Looker customers can expect continuing support of all cloud databases like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and more. Time will tell - but I suspect we’ll see new features will be “bigquery first”
- Lightbody 7y ago
  Look to Stackdriver for guidance: it originally supported AWS and they haven’t removed it in the years since acquisition. I think it’s safe to assume Looker will support many non-GCP datasources for a very long time.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  I think that Google would love to know what Redshift usage looks like in an aggregated view. It also provides another hook for them into Google Cloud.
jon-wood 7y ago
I'm curious to see how Google handle acquiring a company which requires some fairly high touch sales. Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about.
- tyingq 7y ago
  They have done that sort of acquisition before...Apigee is one example. Before that, ITA software.
- gk1 7y ago
  > Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about. That describes most enterprise software, so it's not a unique challenge.
- victor106 7y ago
  > at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it They don’t have a price on their website. Can anyone here provide what price points a medium-large company is looking(no pun intended) at?
  - buremba 7y ago
    The pricing starts from $3k for 20 users if you subscribe to one of their annual plans.
    - ksalay 7y ago
      Tableau is $70/month per user
      - cosmie 7y ago
fhoffa 7y ago
At Next 2018 we had Jordan Tigani (BigQuery Director at Google) and lloyd tabb (Founder of Looker) on stage together. Maybe a sign of things to come: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gYUGv_omJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gYUGv_omJA
gk1 7y ago
Smart move. Google wants to own the entire data infrastructure. Alooma (acquired in February) gets your data from various sources into BigQuery, then all the analysis is done in Looker. Unfortunate news for non-Looker users: Supposedly Alooma stopped supporting Redshift and Snowflake integrations following the acquisition, since those compete with BigQuery. If you're using Looker with Redshift or Snowflake you should be concerned. Edit: By “stopped supporting” I meant they deprioritized it from the roadmap. I do not mean that they disabled the integration.
- amelius 7y ago
  > Google wants to own the entire data infrastructure. Not just the infrastructure. They want the data too!
  - gk1 7y ago
    I doubt it. This isn't the consumer market--they make money from the software or professional services, not advertising.
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  I doubt you need to be concerned about Snowflake: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/announcing-snowflake-on-google-cloud-platform https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/announ...
- nofinator 7y ago
  Did Alooma really stop support for Redshift and Snowflake? Officially they say they still do https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing Maybe you're personally noticing a difference in the amount of support before and after the acquisition?
  - gk1 7y ago
    I should have said "actively supporting" or "actively developing." This is something I heard from one of their customers, which means their customers are noticing a difference.
macspoofing 7y ago
Good for Looker. Hopefully that will cut down on aggressive spam and sales from Looker.
sturgill 7y ago
I'm a huge fan of Looker, but I'm not sure how I feel about this news. The best parts of Looker: - It connects directly to your existing data warehouse. Most BI tools suck in your data into their datastore; Looker queries your database directly. If you wanted Looker to cache results for performance reasons, you could set up a dedicated schema in Redshift for example and only give write privileges to that one schema. But even the cached dataset was stored directly in your data warehouse. - It is platform agnostic. - LookML is backed by Git. By default, changes to your LookML definitions are pushed to a Looker-owned Github repo, but you can change this so that the repo is under your control as well. - The support is pretty phenomenal. There's that unsettled part in me that's wondering the over/under on two years before we get the next announcement: to give you better performance, it's tightly integrated with BigQuery; LookML is getting long in the tooth so we've gone ahead and created the views you'll need which are now accessible via the Google Analytics interface; you can go ahead and forward your concerns to /dev/null.
- systemBuilder 7y ago
  mode analytics connects to your data warehouse, too.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sildur 7y ago
  Oh, I can tell you what is going to happen. It is going to be killed in about 2-3 years.
  - dangoor 7y ago
    Just like Stackdriver (acquired in 2014)? Seriously, it seems like Looker is filling a specific hole in the Google Cloud offering.
    - tshanmu 7y ago
      stackdriver works nicely for all resources in the Google Ecosystem - isn't it what Google would want?
not_that_noob 7y ago
No mention of the purchase price - tho Looker was likely flying in unicorn heights.
- rankam 7y ago
  $2.6B
- fhoffa 7y ago
  $2.6b, all cash. - https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/ https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/
chirau 7y ago
"Looker -- SQL for Dummies" Before you downvote me, these are not mine words but actually from a Looker engineer I asked to summarize the product. I don't know how accurate the quote is, but it stuck with me. Also, congrats to the team I guess. Is an acquisition an accomplishment or just a decision?
- mountainofdeath 7y ago
  I can confirm that. I spent some time looking at it when the entire sales team at the SaaS startup I was at insisted on it. I'll admit, I have yet to see a BI tool that was this easy. I tried selling them first on a self-hosted instance of Apache Caravel, but it turns out ANY SQL is too much.
  - sturgill 7y ago
    To be fair to LookML, it does some great things (kind of like SASS vs CSS). It's great defining constraints in a single variable and then being able to reuse those constraints in any query. It's also wonderful being able to set both default and global constraints: the first can be overwritten, but the second can't. I was once part of a project where we had certain users and payments we would flag as invalid (for fraud or other reasons). We wanted those records in our data warehouse for very specific reports, but never wanted anyone who was consuming reports to be able to include them in final counts. A global constraint in the LookML definition was a perfect answer. I could still run specific reports directly against Redshift, but there was no concern that a less technical manager would get confused. I'm not associated with Looker in any way, but have really enjoyed working with their product. I was really hoping they'd stay on the path of independence and IPO, but I can't fault them for taking billions of dollars and calling it a day...
  - infinite8s 7y ago
    LookML is basically a DSL for business analytics rules (what does customer churn mean, how do we capture sales) compiled to SQL.
- rockostrich 7y ago
  Making money is an accomplishment for most people.
Achshar 7y ago
Me and My team have been working on a Looker alternative for a couple of years. Hope this is the right time to give a pitch. We as a company love to assist our clients with a free consultation in understanding their data better. This will take you to the direct demo: https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=katoai&ref=hn https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=k... I can talk a lot about it if anyone is interested.
- systemBuilder 7y ago
  That looks pretty much like a dress-up of Superset, intended to hide that it's superset.
  - Achshar 7y ago
    We do a bunch of stuff superset doesn't. Mostly related to filters and how they're implemented. We never mess with user's query. We only supply filters to it. Superset doesn't let users write optimized queries. We replaced superset for one of our largest clients and they are extremely happy with the move. This is pure js as well, nothing like superset tech stack wise.
- ddon 7y ago
  What is the target market? Can small business use this? Looks pretty cool!
  - seektable 7y ago
    For small business you can also check our https://www.seektable.com https://www.seektable.com (primarily for data crunching / reporting)
  - Achshar 7y ago
    The target market is anyone who has any kind of data. CSV, mysql, etc. Basically Tableau but much cheaper and customisable. We already have a few small business using Kato. They seem to enjoy that.
aleks_me2 7y ago
The page is White with JavaScript off. Here the Info which is readable with JavaScript off :-) https://looker.com/blog/looker-to-join-google-cloud https://looker.com/blog/looker-to-join-google-cloud
royalharsh95 7y ago
We use Looker and BigQuery. LookML is amazing, once you know how to use it. Looker has some nice documentation and community built around it. - https://training.looker.com/ - https://discourse.looker.com/
asmodeous789 7y ago
As someone on the BQ -> Looker Stack, I'm very very happy about this news. I also think their going to not have pricing pressure for a while as Google may want them to keep taking market share away from Tableau, Qlik, etc.
philshem 7y ago
This will be a great addition into GCP. Data Studio is decent but can't compete with Tableau, Qlik, etc.
- lmkg 7y ago
  Data Studio actually isn't part of GCP at all, it's part of GMP (with Analytics & DV360/DoubleClick). There are integrations between the two, but my guess is that Data Studio continues to exist in GMP and fills the role of dashboards for marketers, while Looker will fulfill the BI role.
  - dudus 7y ago
    Technically yes but datastudio is also listed as a cloud product. Datastudio actually lives in an intersection between GMP, cloud and gsuite
    - philshem 7y ago
      Yes, indeed. Lot's of connectors to non-GMP stuff: https://datastudio.google.com/data https://datastudio.google.com/data
tmountain 7y ago
I'm curious what this means for folks that opted to use Looker for their embedded analytics and if that's something Google is interested in supporting over the long-term? I'm also wondering how this affects pricing over the long-term and whether this becomes a replacement for Data Studio / commoditized analytics platform to make GCP more compelling? Would it be in Google's interest to offer this for free (or at least with very little up front cost) in the interest of competing with AWS? As a sidenote, Looker is a great platform. I evaluated 8 BI platforms late last year, and it really stood out (LookML, Git integration, awesome charting widgets, customization, etc).
- sv123 7y ago
  Very worried on the embedded side, we spent a full year migrating off of sisense embedded onto Looker embedded and literally launched two days ago. Embedded on any BI platform already seems like a red-headed stepchild with a little love, but not too much, being put into it in fits and starts. It could be so useful to so many companies, but the platform costs puts it outside most of their reach, so it ends up just hanging out. The thought of moving again makes me ill, not just for the herculean dev effort, but the fact that Looker really does have one of the only really useful embedded offerings. No other BI tool could compare.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - drinkzima 7y ago
    We aren’t going anywhere. You’re going to continue to get the same product and support you are used to.
buremba 7y ago
Hey all, as a potential competitor of Looker, I'm not sure how I should feel about this news. :) Here are some of the facts: 1. When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Even though Alooma is a data pipeline tool which makes it similar to Looker's case, the deal was $150M (compared to $2.6B) so I'm not sure the comparison makes sense. 2. Looker's sale team is so aggressive and their support team is great. In fact, that's why Looker became so big in the last few years. Google is not famous in terms of support. 3. Google is serious on BigQuery and I'm almost sure it will make Looker part of the Google Cloud. Since most of Looker customers are enterprise companies, Google will probably chase them to switch to BigQuery. On the other hand, Google has tons of BI tools (Data Studio, BigQuery BI Engine, etc.) so I'm not sure if Google makes Looker part of their analytics stack. P.S: We're big fans of the LookML and we have developed a LookML alternative based on Jsonnet (https://jsonnet.org/ https://jsonnet.org/) and the great data pipeline tool DBT. (https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt). Here is how it looks like: https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event/pages.event.jsonnet https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event...
- bob_roboto 7y ago
  > When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Do you have a source for that? As far as I can see on their website [1] they still support it [1] https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift
- tmountain 7y ago
  Is there an official project for your LookML alternative or is it part of a larger Github repo?
  - buremba 7y ago
    We actually developed this feature (we call it recipe) 2 weeks ago and we're working on the documentation at the moment. Since we focus on product data, the first recipe is written for Segment Warehouse. When users connect to their Segment warehouse, we automatically install this recipe, they can fork our Segment recipe to build their models on top of our base recipe. Thanks to DBT, we support some advanced features such as incremental materialization and since our focus is on product data, we have embedded features such as funnel & retention & segmentation. Our product is not feature-complete compared to Looker but we're implementing features & working on stability for the last few months. One of our team members is working on automatic LookML converter to Rakam Recipe so that we can have more coverage of LookML. We will definitely focus more on Looker use-cases after this acquisition. :) Would love to talk if anyone is interested! (email is in my bio)
stunt 7y ago
BigPlans for BigQuery
JaimeThompson 7y ago
What is the over / under on how many days till Google kills all their products?
- johnatwork 7y ago
  1.5 years Unless they say put out a statement to commit their efforts into keeping it the way it is. If that statement comes out, then shorten it to 1 year.
9diov 7y ago
For anyone who is not familiar with Looker, I wrote a write-up and review about it here https://www.holistics.io/blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/ https://www.holistics.io/blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/. Here are the key points: - Its use of LookML provides a steep learning curve, yet provides a maintainable and reusable data modeling - Looker's drill-down ability is decently powerful and easy to use once you are familiar with LookML. - Looker does not have its own storage layer but instead relies on customer's data warehouses - Looker, in essence, is a SQL query builder engine that converts business users' drag-and-drop inputs into SQL queries. - Looker provides highly flexible and sophisticated access control and permission management, sacrificing simplicity for power. - Looker has limited data preparation capabilities compared to other tools, delegating this task to its partners to provide these capabilities.
siliconc0w 7y ago
Looker is a pretty interesting tool that essentially solves the SQL manageability problem. SQL is really hard to reuse but LookML data models are easily reused (and are versioned in git which is really nice since Business Analysts typically aren't familiar with version control). Integrating LookML-style data modeling into BigQuery could be interesting...
reilly3000 7y ago
I've used Looker before and am mostly a fan. Contrary to many of the comments here, its not precisely a 'kiddie' tool for people that don't want to learn SQL; its more like a ORM/DSL for BI queries. I'd probably be using it in my current gig, but the licensing model doesn't really work for small operations. Google Cloud has an actually great track record of acquiring data-centric companies and democratizing them. While Data Studio is pretty amazing for a free tool, it has many shortcomings for serious use, and Looker fills all those holes nicely, while also providing the ability to formalize processes around data. Instead of mousing around Data Studio, Looker allows for all of its resources to be defined in its YAMLish syntax and maintained in source control.
xibalba 7y ago
Hopefully Looker's viz/dashboarding functionality is quickly and tightly integrated with GCP. Data Studio is woefully under featured.
iblaine 7y ago
Before this acquisition: Looker > Tableau > QlikView > Superset (now preset.io) After this acquisition: Superset (now preset.io) > Looker > Tableau > QlikView Now that Looker is owned by a corporation, the innovation is going to diminish. The creative forces will cash out and move on. I think Superset is going to fill the void that these BI corporations leave behind.
- streblo 7y ago
  Looker has always been owned by a corporation.
wmichelin 7y ago
Congrats to the team at Looker!
jimmyjoejoe 7y ago
I used looker for a year, brought it into a previous company and looked (pun unintentional) at using it in the present one. The sales team turned me off completely, very aggressive, Always-Be-Closing types and I could not be bothered listening to them. I had a very weird meeting where one of them broke out in a sweat and sort of flipped out and then had to leave the room, the sales engineer did not know what to do and tried to go, oh look over there, while the guy paced up and down the corridor, head bouncing over the frosted glass. He arrived back, rubbing his fore-head, smacking his cheeks, apologising profusely and then trotted out the usual sales junk. Loved the original team and the product was great but I suppose thats what happens when you have to scale up - the bozos clamber aboard.
didip 7y ago
wow, Google is hella serious in pushing GCP to the next level. Multi billion dollars investment year after year.
croisillon 7y ago
It's been an incredible journey!
tuke 7y ago
Frankly, this one patent is worth a lot of money. This is the magic by which Looker casts out duplicate records in joins. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22tabb,+lloyd%22.INNM.&OS=IN/%22tabb,+lloyd%22&RS=IN/%22tabb,+lloyd%22 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
- kwillets 7y ago
  Ha, SQL hacks as patents.
hui-zheng 7y ago
below my view on this acquisition. I think Google is making a good move to break into Enterprise market. After Thomas Kurian joined Google (He is from Oracle), he said that Google will become a leading vendor for Enterprise IT solution and serve the largest enterprise clients in the world. He aims to compete with IBM, SAP and Oracle (Microsoft is is not the best player in this field.) Case in point, Google announce Anthos this year, which aims specifically to serve large enterprise. Looker is one of the best upcoming BI platforms in the market. I like Looker. I even took Looker Certificate exam 3 years ago because I think Looker consultant will be valuable in the future. I would’ve already joined Looker to get their shares if they have office in Vancouver. :slightly_smiling_face: LookML is a killer feature that solves a critical pain point in Enterprise BI and set Looker apart from the competitors, like Tableau and Periscope. This feature is no value to small startups and small company, but great feature for mid-size company, and critical to Large enterprise BI. Looker has a great potential to become the next leading Large Enterprise BI that successes Oracle OBIEE, MS PowerBI and SAP Business Object. I think if Google is to take Looker and make it the next Enterprise BI and use it to get in the door of large Enterprise Customers, They are making a right strategy move. Google will bring a superior BI solution to its top-tier enterprise customers than IBM, Oracle, SAP. It plays well with Google’s strength in data offering, and BI the easier segment for Google to break through comparing to ERP, CRM and other enterprise solution segments. If Google just wants part of Looker and absorb into the Google Machine, they are paying too high a price tag for it. (I don’t think that’s what Google are doing). I don’t think Google is buying it to eliminate competitor either, Google doesn’t have any products that offer similar features or target same market as Looker

360 points by rohit6223 7y ago

rohit6223 7y ago

https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/ https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/

outside1234 7y ago

Hopefully Google starts a campus in the Santa Cruz area off the back of this...

jrowley 7y ago
That would definitely help Santa Cruz’s rental market
- mc32 7y ago
  It would definitely revitalize the coast. But at what price? Can you imagine the gridlock on State Highway 17 (and the Pac HWY)? If I sat in the governator’s office, I’d push for a commuter line from the South Bay to St Cruz. That would be so much more beneficial than the HSR to no-where we wasted 70 billion on.
  - jrowley 7y ago
    I can only imagine the ecological and financial challenges of putting rail in over the Santa Cruz mountains but would love to see it
    - wbl 7y ago
      We already did it, then abandoned the line.
    - outside1234 7y ago
      Ecological challenges - is it really ecologically challenging to put a tunnel into a mountain versus thousands of cars driving to Silicon Valley every morning. Financial Challenges - please. We have so much money in this state and it is just squandered on so many unneeded things (like the high speed rail line in the central valley).
  - outside1234 7y ago
    It is too obviously a great strategy to put in rail between San Jose Diridon, Los Gatos, and Santa Cruz, so let's build rail in the middle of nowhere instead. There is even an abandoned tunnel under the mountain that did this in the early 1900s!
    - mc32 7y ago
      Thanks for reminding me of that. I thought there had been but wasn't sure if it went all along HWY 17. Apparently there was one running till the 40s.[1] But the highway killed it (not mudslides as is often attributed). There were a total of 8 tunnels most of them condemned and dynamited. But apparently the right of way exists and could be rebuilt! So there is hope if people and businesses push hard enough for it. Commuters would rejoice, SCZ would enjoy revitalization and integration into the Bay Area economy and holidaymakers would enjoy a nice leisurely trip to the beach by train --what a treat that would be! [1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/05/abandoned-railroad-tunnels-tell-tale-of-town-shift-author-talk-next-week/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/05/abandoned-railroad-tu...
      - sjg007 7y ago
        Maybe a hyper loop..
      - imagetic 7y ago
        I don't think anyone in Santa Cruz wants that. As a long-time Santa Cruz resident, the only people I know who want it to be more are tech people who have been pushed down here cause of shortages over the hill or just like to surf.
      - lebca 7y ago
        My understanding was that apart from GM killing it on a more general statewide level, the SC dirt is really soft and the tunnels collapsed a lot more often than expected, taking deaths with them during collapses and rebuilds.
    - riku_iki 7y ago
      Santa Cruz probably doesn't have enough area for expansion to justify rail line.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    There's massive gridlock for Santa Cruz county residents commuting out to the valley for their workdays. The worst is probably between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. I know Looker to really incentivize keeping their workforce local.
- imagetic 7y ago
  Ha. What rental market? What's left is either falling down or something only a Google employee can afford.
- deepakhj 7y ago
  There’s plenty of apple and Netflix employees in Santa Cruz that commute over the hill. Also amazon has an office on pacific.
rcpt 7y ago
Yeah that bus ride is getting long

brd529 7y ago

Most looker instances I’ve seen are wired to redshift. How long until support for non google cloud databases is dropped, deprioritized, etc?

Donald 7y ago
Maybe this behavior will change under the scrutiny of anti-trust investigations.
brd529 7y ago
The looker blog post addresses this though the google one doesn’t: > For customers and partners, it’s important to know that today’s announcement solidifies ours as well as Google Cloud’s commitment to multi-cloud. Looker customers can expect continuing support of all cloud databases like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and more. Time will tell - but I suspect we’ll see new features will be “bigquery first”
Lightbody 7y ago
Look to Stackdriver for guidance: it originally supported AWS and they haven’t removed it in the years since acquisition. I think it’s safe to assume Looker will support many non-GCP datasources for a very long time.
reilly3000 7y ago
I think that Google would love to know what Redshift usage looks like in an aggregated view. It also provides another hook for them into Google Cloud.

jon-wood 7y ago

I'm curious to see how Google handle acquiring a company which requires some fairly high touch sales. Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about.

tyingq 7y ago
They have done that sort of acquisition before...Apigee is one example. Before that, ITA software.
gk1 7y ago
> Looker is a fantastic tool, but its not something which is useful from day one, and at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it that they involve a lot of sales engineering in getting new customers to a point where they're able to query data they care about. That describes most enterprise software, so it's not a unique challenge.
victor106 7y ago
> at least currently has a high enough price tag attached to it They don’t have a price on their website. Can anyone here provide what price points a medium-large company is looking(no pun intended) at?
- buremba 7y ago
  The pricing starts from $3k for 20 users if you subscribe to one of their annual plans.
  - ksalay 7y ago
    Tableau is $70/month per user
    - cosmie 7y ago

fhoffa 7y ago

At Next 2018 we had Jordan Tigani (BigQuery Director at Google) and lloyd tabb (Founder of Looker) on stage together. Maybe a sign of things to come: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gYUGv_omJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gYUGv_omJA

gk1 7y ago

Smart move. Google wants to own the entire data infrastructure. Alooma (acquired in February) gets your data from various sources into BigQuery, then all the analysis is done in Looker. Unfortunate news for non-Looker users: Supposedly Alooma stopped supporting Redshift and Snowflake integrations following the acquisition, since those compete with BigQuery. If you're using Looker with Redshift or Snowflake you should be concerned. Edit: By “stopped supporting” I meant they deprioritized it from the roadmap. I do not mean that they disabled the integration.

amelius 7y ago
> Google wants to own the entire data infrastructure. Not just the infrastructure. They want the data too!
- gk1 7y ago
  I doubt it. This isn't the consumer market--they make money from the software or professional services, not advertising.
v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
I doubt you need to be concerned about Snowflake: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/announcing-snowflake-on-google-cloud-platform https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/announ...
nofinator 7y ago
Did Alooma really stop support for Redshift and Snowflake? Officially they say they still do https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing Maybe you're personally noticing a difference in the amount of support before and after the acquisition?
- gk1 7y ago
  I should have said "actively supporting" or "actively developing." This is something I heard from one of their customers, which means their customers are noticing a difference.

macspoofing 7y ago

Good for Looker. Hopefully that will cut down on aggressive spam and sales from Looker.

sturgill 7y ago

I'm a huge fan of Looker, but I'm not sure how I feel about this news. The best parts of Looker: - It connects directly to your existing data warehouse. Most BI tools suck in your data into their datastore; Looker queries your database directly. If you wanted Looker to cache results for performance reasons, you could set up a dedicated schema in Redshift for example and only give write privileges to that one schema. But even the cached dataset was stored directly in your data warehouse. - It is platform agnostic. - LookML is backed by Git. By default, changes to your LookML definitions are pushed to a Looker-owned Github repo, but you can change this so that the repo is under your control as well. - The support is pretty phenomenal. There's that unsettled part in me that's wondering the over/under on two years before we get the next announcement: to give you better performance, it's tightly integrated with BigQuery; LookML is getting long in the tooth so we've gone ahead and created the views you'll need which are now accessible via the Google Analytics interface; you can go ahead and forward your concerns to /dev/null.

systemBuilder 7y ago
mode analytics connects to your data warehouse, too.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sildur 7y ago
Oh, I can tell you what is going to happen. It is going to be killed in about 2-3 years.
- dangoor 7y ago
  Just like Stackdriver (acquired in 2014)? Seriously, it seems like Looker is filling a specific hole in the Google Cloud offering.
  - tshanmu 7y ago
    stackdriver works nicely for all resources in the Google Ecosystem - isn't it what Google would want?

not_that_noob 7y ago

No mention of the purchase price - tho Looker was likely flying in unicorn heights.

rankam 7y ago
$2.6B
fhoffa 7y ago
$2.6b, all cash. - https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/ https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606/

chirau 7y ago

"Looker -- SQL for Dummies" Before you downvote me, these are not mine words but actually from a Looker engineer I asked to summarize the product. I don't know how accurate the quote is, but it stuck with me. Also, congrats to the team I guess. Is an acquisition an accomplishment or just a decision?

mountainofdeath 7y ago
I can confirm that. I spent some time looking at it when the entire sales team at the SaaS startup I was at insisted on it. I'll admit, I have yet to see a BI tool that was this easy. I tried selling them first on a self-hosted instance of Apache Caravel, but it turns out ANY SQL is too much.
- sturgill 7y ago
  To be fair to LookML, it does some great things (kind of like SASS vs CSS). It's great defining constraints in a single variable and then being able to reuse those constraints in any query. It's also wonderful being able to set both default and global constraints: the first can be overwritten, but the second can't. I was once part of a project where we had certain users and payments we would flag as invalid (for fraud or other reasons). We wanted those records in our data warehouse for very specific reports, but never wanted anyone who was consuming reports to be able to include them in final counts. A global constraint in the LookML definition was a perfect answer. I could still run specific reports directly against Redshift, but there was no concern that a less technical manager would get confused. I'm not associated with Looker in any way, but have really enjoyed working with their product. I was really hoping they'd stay on the path of independence and IPO, but I can't fault them for taking billions of dollars and calling it a day...
- infinite8s 7y ago
  LookML is basically a DSL for business analytics rules (what does customer churn mean, how do we capture sales) compiled to SQL.
rockostrich 7y ago
Making money is an accomplishment for most people.

Achshar 7y ago

Me and My team have been working on a Looker alternative for a couple of years. Hope this is the right time to give a pitch. We as a company love to assist our clients with a free consultation in understanding their data better. This will take you to the direct demo: https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=katoai&ref=hn https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=k... I can talk a lot about it if anyone is interested.

systemBuilder 7y ago
That looks pretty much like a dress-up of Superset, intended to hide that it's superset.
- Achshar 7y ago
  We do a bunch of stuff superset doesn't. Mostly related to filters and how they're implemented. We never mess with user's query. We only supply filters to it. Superset doesn't let users write optimized queries. We replaced superset for one of our largest clients and they are extremely happy with the move. This is pure js as well, nothing like superset tech stack wise.
ddon 7y ago
What is the target market? Can small business use this? Looks pretty cool!
- seektable 7y ago
  For small business you can also check our https://www.seektable.com https://www.seektable.com (primarily for data crunching / reporting)
- Achshar 7y ago
  The target market is anyone who has any kind of data. CSV, mysql, etc. Basically Tableau but much cheaper and customisable. We already have a few small business using Kato. They seem to enjoy that.

aleks_me2 7y ago

The page is White with JavaScript off. Here the Info which is readable with JavaScript off :-) https://looker.com/blog/looker-to-join-google-cloud https://looker.com/blog/looker-to-join-google-cloud

royalharsh95 7y ago

We use Looker and BigQuery. LookML is amazing, once you know how to use it. Looker has some nice documentation and community built around it. - https://training.looker.com/ - https://discourse.looker.com/

asmodeous789 7y ago

As someone on the BQ -> Looker Stack, I'm very very happy about this news. I also think their going to not have pricing pressure for a while as Google may want them to keep taking market share away from Tableau, Qlik, etc.

philshem 7y ago

This will be a great addition into GCP. Data Studio is decent but can't compete with Tableau, Qlik, etc.

lmkg 7y ago
Data Studio actually isn't part of GCP at all, it's part of GMP (with Analytics & DV360/DoubleClick). There are integrations between the two, but my guess is that Data Studio continues to exist in GMP and fills the role of dashboards for marketers, while Looker will fulfill the BI role.
- dudus 7y ago
  Technically yes but datastudio is also listed as a cloud product. Datastudio actually lives in an intersection between GMP, cloud and gsuite
  - philshem 7y ago
    Yes, indeed. Lot's of connectors to non-GMP stuff: https://datastudio.google.com/data https://datastudio.google.com/data

tmountain 7y ago

I'm curious what this means for folks that opted to use Looker for their embedded analytics and if that's something Google is interested in supporting over the long-term? I'm also wondering how this affects pricing over the long-term and whether this becomes a replacement for Data Studio / commoditized analytics platform to make GCP more compelling? Would it be in Google's interest to offer this for free (or at least with very little up front cost) in the interest of competing with AWS? As a sidenote, Looker is a great platform. I evaluated 8 BI platforms late last year, and it really stood out (LookML, Git integration, awesome charting widgets, customization, etc).

sv123 7y ago
Very worried on the embedded side, we spent a full year migrating off of sisense embedded onto Looker embedded and literally launched two days ago. Embedded on any BI platform already seems like a red-headed stepchild with a little love, but not too much, being put into it in fits and starts. It could be so useful to so many companies, but the platform costs puts it outside most of their reach, so it ends up just hanging out. The thought of moving again makes me ill, not just for the herculean dev effort, but the fact that Looker really does have one of the only really useful embedded offerings. No other BI tool could compare.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- drinkzima 7y ago
  We aren’t going anywhere. You’re going to continue to get the same product and support you are used to.

buremba 7y ago

Hey all, as a potential competitor of Looker, I'm not sure how I should feel about this news. :) Here are some of the facts: 1. When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Even though Alooma is a data pipeline tool which makes it similar to Looker's case, the deal was $150M (compared to $2.6B) so I'm not sure the comparison makes sense. 2. Looker's sale team is so aggressive and their support team is great. In fact, that's why Looker became so big in the last few years. Google is not famous in terms of support. 3. Google is serious on BigQuery and I'm almost sure it will make Looker part of the Google Cloud. Since most of Looker customers are enterprise companies, Google will probably chase them to switch to BigQuery. On the other hand, Google has tons of BI tools (Data Studio, BigQuery BI Engine, etc.) so I'm not sure if Google makes Looker part of their analytics stack. P.S: We're big fans of the LookML and we have developed a LookML alternative based on Jsonnet (https://jsonnet.org/ https://jsonnet.org/) and the great data pipeline tool DBT. (https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt). Here is how it looks like: https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event/pages.event.jsonnet https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event...

bob_roboto 7y ago
> When Google acquired Alooma, they slowed down the development and dropped the support for other destinations such as Redshift and Hive. Do you have a source for that? As far as I can see on their website [1] they still support it [1] https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift https://www.alooma.com/integrations/to/redshift
tmountain 7y ago
Is there an official project for your LookML alternative or is it part of a larger Github repo?
- buremba 7y ago
  We actually developed this feature (we call it recipe) 2 weeks ago and we're working on the documentation at the moment. Since we focus on product data, the first recipe is written for Segment Warehouse. When users connect to their Segment warehouse, we automatically install this recipe, they can fork our Segment recipe to build their models on top of our base recipe. Thanks to DBT, we support some advanced features such as incremental materialization and since our focus is on product data, we have embedded features such as funnel & retention & segmentation. Our product is not feature-complete compared to Looker but we're implementing features & working on stability for the last few months. One of our team members is working on automatic LookML converter to Rakam Recipe so that we can have more coverage of LookML. We will definitely focus more on Looker use-cases after this acquisition. :) Would love to talk if anyone is interested! (email is in my bio)

stunt 7y ago

BigPlans for BigQuery

JaimeThompson 7y ago

What is the over / under on how many days till Google kills all their products?

johnatwork 7y ago
1.5 years Unless they say put out a statement to commit their efforts into keeping it the way it is. If that statement comes out, then shorten it to 1 year.

9diov 7y ago

For anyone who is not familiar with Looker, I wrote a write-up and review about it here https://www.holistics.io/blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/ https://www.holistics.io/blog/looker-review-and-breakdown/. Here are the key points: - Its use of LookML provides a steep learning curve, yet provides a maintainable and reusable data modeling - Looker's drill-down ability is decently powerful and easy to use once you are familiar with LookML. - Looker does not have its own storage layer but instead relies on customer's data warehouses - Looker, in essence, is a SQL query builder engine that converts business users' drag-and-drop inputs into SQL queries. - Looker provides highly flexible and sophisticated access control and permission management, sacrificing simplicity for power. - Looker has limited data preparation capabilities compared to other tools, delegating this task to its partners to provide these capabilities.

siliconc0w 7y ago

Looker is a pretty interesting tool that essentially solves the SQL manageability problem. SQL is really hard to reuse but LookML data models are easily reused (and are versioned in git which is really nice since Business Analysts typically aren't familiar with version control). Integrating LookML-style data modeling into BigQuery could be interesting...

reilly3000 7y ago

I've used Looker before and am mostly a fan. Contrary to many of the comments here, its not precisely a 'kiddie' tool for people that don't want to learn SQL; its more like a ORM/DSL for BI queries. I'd probably be using it in my current gig, but the licensing model doesn't really work for small operations. Google Cloud has an actually great track record of acquiring data-centric companies and democratizing them. While Data Studio is pretty amazing for a free tool, it has many shortcomings for serious use, and Looker fills all those holes nicely, while also providing the ability to formalize processes around data. Instead of mousing around Data Studio, Looker allows for all of its resources to be defined in its YAMLish syntax and maintained in source control.

xibalba 7y ago

Hopefully Looker's viz/dashboarding functionality is quickly and tightly integrated with GCP. Data Studio is woefully under featured.

iblaine 7y ago

Before this acquisition: Looker > Tableau > QlikView > Superset (now preset.io) After this acquisition: Superset (now preset.io) > Looker > Tableau > QlikView Now that Looker is owned by a corporation, the innovation is going to diminish. The creative forces will cash out and move on. I think Superset is going to fill the void that these BI corporations leave behind.

streblo 7y ago
Looker has always been owned by a corporation.

wmichelin 7y ago

Congrats to the team at Looker!

jimmyjoejoe 7y ago

I used looker for a year, brought it into a previous company and looked (pun unintentional) at using it in the present one. The sales team turned me off completely, very aggressive, Always-Be-Closing types and I could not be bothered listening to them. I had a very weird meeting where one of them broke out in a sweat and sort of flipped out and then had to leave the room, the sales engineer did not know what to do and tried to go, oh look over there, while the guy paced up and down the corridor, head bouncing over the frosted glass. He arrived back, rubbing his fore-head, smacking his cheeks, apologising profusely and then trotted out the usual sales junk. Loved the original team and the product was great but I suppose thats what happens when you have to scale up - the bozos clamber aboard.

didip 7y ago

wow, Google is hella serious in pushing GCP to the next level. Multi billion dollars investment year after year.

croisillon 7y ago

It's been an incredible journey!

tuke 7y ago

Frankly, this one patent is worth a lot of money. This is the magic by which Looker casts out duplicate records in joins. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22tabb,+lloyd%22.INNM.&OS=IN/%22tabb,+lloyd%22&RS=IN/%22tabb,+lloyd%22 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

kwillets 7y ago
Ha, SQL hacks as patents.

hui-zheng 7y ago

below my view on this acquisition. I think Google is making a good move to break into Enterprise market. After Thomas Kurian joined Google (He is from Oracle), he said that Google will become a leading vendor for Enterprise IT solution and serve the largest enterprise clients in the world. He aims to compete with IBM, SAP and Oracle (Microsoft is is not the best player in this field.) Case in point, Google announce Anthos this year, which aims specifically to serve large enterprise. Looker is one of the best upcoming BI platforms in the market. I like Looker. I even took Looker Certificate exam 3 years ago because I think Looker consultant will be valuable in the future. I would’ve already joined Looker to get their shares if they have office in Vancouver. :slightly_smiling_face: LookML is a killer feature that solves a critical pain point in Enterprise BI and set Looker apart from the competitors, like Tableau and Periscope. This feature is no value to small startups and small company, but great feature for mid-size company, and critical to Large enterprise BI. Looker has a great potential to become the next leading Large Enterprise BI that successes Oracle OBIEE, MS PowerBI and SAP Business Object. I think if Google is to take Looker and make it the next Enterprise BI and use it to get in the door of large Enterprise Customers, They are making a right strategy move. Google will bring a superior BI solution to its top-tier enterprise customers than IBM, Oracle, SAP. It plays well with Google’s strength in data offering, and BI the easier segment for Google to break through comparing to ERP, CRM and other enterprise solution segments. If Google just wants part of Looker and absorb into the Google Machine, they are paying too high a price tag for it. (I don’t think that’s what Google are doing). I don’t think Google is buying it to eliminate competitor either, Google doesn’t have any products that offer similar features or target same market as Looker