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Google to Acquire Looker

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Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#41

Post by derefr »

sildur wrote: post #32
sturgill wrote: post #15

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.…

Oh, I can tell you what is going to happen. It is going to be killed in about 2-3 years.

I really, really doubt it; Google has never killed a product that it created or acquired to serve as a complement to enterprise Ads/Analytics usage.

Google kills plenty of its consumer products if they don’t catch on in a big way (Reader, Google+); and it certainly “transitions” developer-targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.) But this is neither—it’s BI software, for enterprise customers who build it deeply into their decision-making in the same way they build Google Analytics itself into their decision-making. These are not the people even Google wants to make mad. They’re precisely the people writing the checks which make up the majority of Google’s ad revenue!

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#42

Post by tmountain »

buremba wrote: post #40

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 ma…

Is there an official project for your LookML alternative or is it part of a larger Github repo?

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#43

Post by sv123 »

sturgill wrote: post #15

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.…

As a looker customer seeing this news makes me very uneasy. We have invested a ton in their platform by building three of our core products on their embedded version. The thought that our future relies now more in Google's product decisions is scary.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#45

Post by dudus »

derefr wrote: post #41
sildur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I can tell you what is going to happen. It is going to be killed in about 2-3 years.

I really, really doubt it; Google has never killed a product that it created or acquired to serve as a complement to enterprise Ads/Analytics usage. Google kills plenty of its consumer products if they don’t catch on in a big way (Reader, Google+); and it certainly “transitions” developer -targeted product/service startups into plain features (Firebase, WordLens, etc.) But this is neither—it’s BI software, for enterp…

That's not correct... Wildfire and Adometry are two examples of products on the ads and analytics space that were killed after acquisition.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#46

Post by sturgill »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #30
chirau wrote: post #21

"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?

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.

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...

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#47

Post by dudus »

lmkg wrote: post #37
philshem wrote: post #34

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

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.

Technically yes but datastudio is also listed as a cloud product. Datastudio actually lives in an intersection between GMP, cloud and gsuite

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#48

Post by buremba »

tmountain wrote: post #42
buremba wrote: post #40

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 ma…

Is there an official project for your LookML alternative or is it part of a larger Github repo?

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)

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#49

Post by wbl »

jrowley wrote: post #27
mc32 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can only imagine the ecological and financial challenges of putting rail in over the Santa Cruz mountains but would love to see it

We already did it, then abandoned the line.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#50

Post by ddon »

Achshar wrote: post #24

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=k... I can talk a lot about it if anyone is interested.

What is the target market? Can small business use this? Looks pretty cool!
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