Breaking news! As you may have already heard around, Google is unifying all its business intelligence products under the Looker brand.
But what does this mean?
Well, from now on, “Looker is the name you’ll hear us use when talking about our Google Cloud business intelligence products, 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 Business Intelligence Product Management wrote in the announcement.
As part of this change, starting October 11, 2022, Data Studio will now become Looker Studio!
But what is Looker? And what is Data Studio? More importantly, why did Google decide to make this change? We will find out in this article and we will try to do some clarity.
What is Looker
Looker is a data platform that organizes our business data in order to easily build insight-powered workflows and applications. Purchased by Google in 2019, the goal of this tool is to let us describe and manage our data in a simple and immediate way.
Once we have a reliable data source for our business data, anyone can analyze it, create visualizations, drill down to raw level detail, and improve productivity by delivering more qualitative insight to users.
Thanks to some of its key features such as LookML, embedded analytics, the Looker API, and the Google Cloud infrastructure, Looker can provide a consistent real-time view of our data and deliver smart insights.
What is Data Studio
Data Studio is an easy-to-use data visualization and reporting tool, and is now a Google Cloud service. It allows you to visualize data with graphs, using fully customizable, easy to manage and shareable templates.
Data Studio tries to aim for simplicity, and therefore it is a great business intelligence tool for exploring your data and making smarter, data-driven decisions.
Like many other business intelligence tools, Data studio also allows you to easily connect from a wide variety of sources such as databases, including BigQuery and MySQL, Google Marketing Platform products, including Google Ads, Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, blended data from various combination of related sources, and many more.
The newborn Looker Studio
With this integration, users will have the opportunity to access the data managed by Looker and import them into Data Studio. This way, users will be able to create views and dashboards for further self-service analysis.
Data Studio itself has not changed because it remains free and has the same features, but will now support data models from Looker, allowing users to make better real time decisions.
Google has also announced “Looker Studio Pro”, which is the paid version of Looker Studio. With the “Pro” version, users will get access to all the features of Looker Studio, plus additional enterprise management features, collaboration tools, and service-level agreements.
Useful links
- Welcome to Looker Studio!
- Looker and Data Studio integrate for best of both worlds | Google Cloud Blog
- The next evolution of Looker, your unified business intelligence platform | Google Cloud Blog
- Welcoming Looker to Google Cloud
