At its Cloud Next conference, Google Cloud today announced that it is unifying all of its business intelligence products under the Looker brand. Google’s $2.6 billion acquisition of Looker closed back in 2020, marking the first major acquisition for Google Cloud under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. As part of this move, Google Data Studio will now become Looker Studio.
“Looker is the name you’ll hear us use when talking about all of our Google Cloud business intelligence product, as we bring together Looker, Data Studio, and core Google technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML),” Kate Wright, Google’s senior director for BI product management, writes in today’s announcement. This combination, Google argues, will allow users to go beyond traditional dashboards — the kind Google Data Studio specializes in — and allow businesses to bring this data into more of their workflows and applications to make data-driven decisions.
Going forward, Looker Studio will support data models from Looker, a feature that is now in preview. This, the company notes, will allow Looker Studio users to work with trusted data via the Looker modeling layer, combining ad hoc data sources with trusted data from Looker.
For more advanced users, Google is also launching Looker Studio Pro today, which adds enterprise management features, team collaboration tools and SLAs to the standard Google Data Studio/Looker Studio mix.
But there is more. Google is also launching Looker (Google Cloud core) in preview today (yes, that’s the name). It’s a new version of Looker that is “deeply integrated with core cloud infrastructure services, such as key security and management services,” the company explains (and that explanation also explains the name).
In addition to this, the company is also launching a preview of a Looker integration with Google Sheets, and it plans to support “visualization tools” like Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI soon, too (though those companies may object to their services being described as “only” being visualization tools).
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