3 Trends That Are Putting the Power of Business Intelligence in More Hands
By: Allen Hillery
Tags: Data Visualization, Business, Google, Business Intelligence, Marketing

3 Trends That Are Putting the Power of Business Intelligence in More Hands

A Conversation with Nick Caldwell on the State of the Business Intelligence Landscape

Looks like the summer is heating up in the Business Intelligence (BI) industry! Two major acquisitions have been announced in June 2019 within a week of each other. The first: Google’s acquisition of Looker for $2.6B. This deal is expected to be completed later this year. Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO released an announcement on his intention to acquire the unified platform for BI, data apps and embedded analytics. Kurian views the acquisition of Looker as an extension of Google’s business analytics offerings. He states, “For any business that is looking for a partner to help drive digital transformation, the combination of Google Cloud and Looker will offer an incredible data management and analytics platform.” While Google is looking to beef up its cloud offerings, Salesforce recently bought Tableau for $15.7B. This was announced the week following the Looker acquisition. Their strategy, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, is to merge the top CRM platform and the top analytics platform to help speed customer digital transformations.

Nick is Looker’s Chief Product Officer, leading the company’s Engineering and Product Management and Design teams. Prior to Looker, he was VP of Engineering at Reddit and the General Manager of Power BI for Microsoft.

I had an opportunity to chat with Looker’s Chief Product Officer, Nick Caldwell about the state of business intelligence and where the industry is heading. He leads the company’s Engineering and Product Management and Design teams. Prior to Looker, he was VP of Engineering at Reddit and General Manager of Power BI for Microsoft. I wanted to get his take on the data visualization landscape and how it’s impacting the data-driven workforce.

Nick acknowledged that there is a lot of consolidation in the BI space right now as big platform players are looking for BI to be “the sizzle on the steak” and give an extra oomph to their portfolios.

Thomas Kurian stated in his press release that, “The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will help us offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualizing results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows.”

this is a BI world that will call for more than just dashboards, data prep and advanced analytics

Nick views both the Looker and Tableau acquisitions as examples of big platforms highlighting their collective power versus the individual capabilities of their product suites. The amount of data at our fingertips is more prevalent in our lives than it has ever been. He explained that this is a BI world that will call for more than just dashboards, data prep and advanced analytics — A trend he’s excited about. We discussed the trends influencing the BI market and how Looker has been riding the data wave! Nick sees three major trends:

Trend 1. The Arrival of a Data-Driven Workforce

Data is embedded in all facets of our lives, especially in the workplace. I definitely agree with him on this point. He went on to say that everyone needs to get the job done — Not just traditional analysts or quantitative marketers. I’m counting the days to when Looker or Tableau are a standard installation on office laptops but thinks standalone apps are the future.

“Of course we still need great BI tools for our analysts and data jockeys. But we must also be aware that there are a rapidly increasing number of data-enabled workers who view the idea of using dashboards the same way that you or I might view using a rotary phone. And that’s okay.”

Trend 2. A proliferation of SaaS Apps

Nick explained that untraditional data folks expect the data to come to them in an interface designed specifically for the task at hand, ideally integrated into a tool they are already familiar with. He speculates that the future of BI will not look much like a BI application at all and believes we will not need to have everyone become familiar with analyst tools to have an insight-driven business. Software as a Service (SaaS) apps are “polished user interfaces on top of rows of data”.

“People aren’t going to go to BI, BI has to go to the people. This is already happening in a big way.” ~Nick Caldwell

While Nick was explaining how the adoption of SaaS apps was skyrocketing, my mind went to dashboards and how they were on the top of every department’s wish list. This usually caused a bottleneck at the analyst as they looked to gather business requirements and find the data set needed to build the views. Then once the dataset was identified, performance was the next problem to deal with. Nick helped me to understand that SaaS apps put the power of data in the hands of non-traditional data folks from factory workers to pizza delivery drivers. I questioned the processing power that would be needed for all of these individual apps. Like dashboards, I figured this would call for numerous data silos and countless meetings with IT to make sure each app ran efficiently. This takes us to trend #3.

Trend 3. Modern Data Infrastructure

Nick explained that Looker took a huge bet and invested heavily in being able to natively support massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouses like Google Cloud Big Query, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift Spectrum. This infrastructure supports the world of SaaS apps. “MPP data warehouses can hold immense amounts of data, query it all in seconds, and even do advanced analytics directly in the database — all this at a cost which is bafflingly cheap compared to last generation technologies.” says Caldwell. He went on to point out this infrastructure improves the lives of data engineers because they can spend less of their time building and maintaining data pipelines and more time doing what they really want: empowering end-users with data-driven experiences.