Looker Announces Looker 7 Data Platform

Looker, a Google company, today introduced Looker 7, the latest version of its data platform, with a new development framework, reimagined dashboards, new integrations, and expanded capabilities for hosting, managing, and securing multicloud enterprise deployments at scale.

"Companies are expanding how they use data by no longer thinking of it solely as something that is analyzed and then displayed on a dashboard but by making its use operational across a myriad of job functions, from revenue optimization to product development," said Frank Bien, CEO of Looker, in a statement. "This shift in thinking is resulting in companies choosing solutions that support a variety of ways to harness data - data experiences - to fuel everyday business processes. BI doesn't just let us know what happened yesterday but becomes how we work today."

Included in Looker 7 are the following:

• A development framework that lets developers customize data experiences within Looker, and embed those experiences anywhere;
• An in-product Marketplace of applications, integrations, plug-ins, templates, data sources, and custom visualizations built by the Looker developer ecosystem;
• A suite of developer tools, including new software development kits for Typescript/Javascript, R, Python, Kotlin, and Swift along with a SDK Codegen to generate SDKs in additional languages, and a Developer Portal;
• New dashboards with configurable filtering options, such as cross-filtering, custom range finders, and more;
• Integrations with Slack, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Auger.ai, mParticle, Matik, and Spiff.com;
• An analytical alert feature that notifies users of important changes in their data;
• SQL runner visualizations that allow raw SQL queries to be displayed in charts and graphs;
• A robust, secure, enterprise-class platform with expanded options for multicloud hosting powered by kubernetes, including managed hosting in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Azure clouds;
• A new connections feature that connects more than 45 data sources to the raw data sources in Looker; and
• System activity analytics that allow administrators to analyze user behavior, adoption of data products, or performance issues.

Looker 7 features will begin rolling out in January.