Looker Business Intelligence Platform

Looker is a business intelligence (BI) and data analytics platform for exploring, analyzing, and sharing real-time data insights. Founded in 2011 by Lloyd Tabb (CTO) and Frank Bien (CEO), headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. Acquired by Google Cloud in February 2020 for $2.6 billion. Serves over 2,000 customers including Amazon, Sony, IBM, Yahoo, and Etsy. Key features: LookML: a SQL-based modeling language defining relationships between data tables, calculated fields, and business metrics. Creates a single source of truth for data definitions, ensuring consistent metrics across dashboards. Version-controlled with Git. Data explorer: interactive exploration with drag-and-drop field selection. Build visualizations, pivot tables, and dashboards without writing SQL. Dashboards: interactive dashboards with filters, drill-downs, conditional formatting. Schedule automatic delivery via email, Slack, or webhook. Embedding: embed dashboards into external applications via Embedding API. White-label options. Data actions: trigger actions in external systems (Salesforce lead, Marketo email) based on data thresholds. Database connections: connects directly to SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Oracle, SQL Server) without data extraction. No data warehousing required. Governed data access with row-level and column-level security. Applications: build custom data applications on top of models. Integrations: Slack, Amazon S3, Marketo, Salesforce, custom webhooks. Ruby/JavaScript. Proprietary.