Google to Acquire Looker • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#31

Post by nofinator » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

gk1 wrote: post #13

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…

Did Alooma really stop support for Redshift and Snowflake? Officially they say they still do https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing

Maybe you're personally noticing a difference in the amount of support before and after the acquisition?

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#32

Post by sildur » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#33

Post by mathattack » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #7

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.

If they’re selling to the Enterprise, high touch Sales is something they will need to learn.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#34

Post by philshem » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

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

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#35

Post by tmountain » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

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).

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#36

Post by gk1 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

nofinator wrote: post #31

gk1 wrote: post #13

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…

Did Alooma really stop support for Redshift and Snowflake? Officially they say they still do https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing Maybe you're personally noticing a difference in the amount of support before and after the acquisition?

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.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#37

Post by lmkg » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:07 PM UTC

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.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#38

Post by ironchef » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

nofinator wrote: post #31

gk1 wrote: post #13

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…

Did Alooma really stop support for Redshift and Snowflake? Officially they say they still do https://www.alooma.com/solutions/data-warehousing Maybe you're personally noticing a difference in the amount of support before and after the acquisition?

They did not. We use it with snowflake and it's just fine right now. What they did do was put most of their roadmap on hold while they figure out what future direction looks like.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#39

Post by dangoor » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

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.

Just like Stackdriver (acquired in 2014)?

Seriously, it seems like Looker is filling a specific hole in the Google Cloud offering.

Re: Google to Acquire Looker

#40

Post by buremba » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

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/) and the great data pipeline tool DBT. (https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt). Here is how it looks like: https://github.com/rakam-io/segment-recipe/blob/master/event...