A Second Look At Looker
A BIMadness2018 article — written to inspire. Vote today!
So as the title suggests, this is round two. Looker was our user choice from last week and featured in an earlier article. I suppose it was the shiniest of the objects…
This article will focus more on its position in the BI universe and some of its history.
A lot of the Business Intelligence process is… less than noble.
Too often, it starts here. We live in a point-and-click, plug-and-play universe. Companies employing AWS, especially Redshift on AWS, come to this menu to find their BI tool.
A little bit of history, this list was much smaller not too long ago. AWS is an unconquered platform. Unlike Azure, Amazon has not officially endorsed or purchased a real BI solution. By stating this, I am discounting QuickSight as a “real” BI solution. Do you blame me? Does anyone use it? It is only 15 months old, but where is it?
Not long ago, this list was… well, Yellofin. Now they are last. Perhaps they should take a lead from all the government contract vying firms and change their name to 1Yellowfin…
Yellowfin is trying to sell on Why and Faster. News flash guys, you can’t tell anyone Why anything and few companies can actually handle Faster. I recognize that Why sells, but in analytics, it is an unattainable promise that buyers will remember. And Faster is just not better right now.
With the fall of Yellowfin (fewer than 200 companies use it today), came Looker. Now Looker is not as popular as Tableau or Qlik (not by a lot). And it is still lagging Power BI. But it is growing fast — 64% y/y. Data source.
Looker is a Platform-based solution. Not completely, but I have yet to encounter a company using Looker and not using AWS. I am sure some exist, somewhere… For a while, Looker enjoyed a pretty exclusive set of competition, but as the graphic shows — that has changed.
Looker sells on data driven. I can appreciate that. Looker is modular. They offer building Blocks to their users. They have a shallow learning curve and (unlike Yellowfin) offer a great deal of customization and adaptability. Start-ups love them. They probably should… for now.
That bears repeating — for now.
Can Looker scale? Is AWS getting too crowded… and that goes beyond just the BI layer. Can Looker take hold beyond their platform roots? I don’t see them going full-service too soon. But stranger things have happened. Do they have a desktop path? Not at their current pricing…
But things change… just ask Yellowfin. For now — Looker is growing strong. It is popular. It is formidable. And in #BIMadness2018 — it was the people’s choice. Will it overcome Qlik in the Final Four? That is up to you. Vote now. Comment below or go back to the article that started this all -
Most of all thanks for reading!
Catch all of BI Madness from this year and years past —
