MATT RYAN: Hello, my name is Matt Ryan.
I'm a Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud who's focused
on business intelligence.
I thought there would be no better place
to begin our "Innovator TechTalk"
series than by bringing on two members of Looker's product
team to give an explanation of the Looker Difference.
If your organization is investing in Cloud databases
or using BigQuery, please consider
connecting with your Google Cloud customer success
manager or member of our field team to get
started using Looker.
This is a replay of one of our keynotes from Looker's
annual user conference, Join.
Please welcome Ani Jain and Tej Toor.
Over to you.
SPEAKER: Welcome, ladies.
ANI JAIN: Hi, everyone.
Thank you for taking the time and joining us today.
We are super excited to be here today and talk to you
about the Looker Difference.
But first, let us introduce ourselves.
My name is Ani Jain.
I'm an Outbound Product Manager at Looker.
And I'm joined by my colleague, Tej Toor.
Tej, do you want to introduce yourself?
TEJ TOOR: Sure.
Thanks, Ani.
Hi, my name is Tej Toor, and I'm a Product Manager
on the BI Team at Looker.
ANI JAIN: Awesome.
So before we go into the product,
I wanted to talk to you about how data has changed our lives.
Over the past couple of decades, the way
we experience data has fundamentally
changed our lives, be it Google Maps, be it Alexa,
be it Fitbit, and so many more.
These are the points solutions in right in time for data
insights.
And as working remotely becomes more of a reality,
this trend will push businesses to adapt to new employee
expectations and their need for productivity,
and businesses will just have to rethink BI.
Let's say when we sit down to watch our favorite streaming
service, or when we're navigating traffic,
or we're working out, or we're shopping online.
We don't really think about data when
we're doing these activities because data has fundamentally
become just an essential part of our lives.
And then this is exactly what we need to bring to our work
environment as well.
This moment is an enormous opportunity
to completely transform the way millions
of people work with data.
Now one of the BI industry analyst,
Doug Hansen, who's the Vice President and Principal
Analyst for the analyst firm, Constellation Research,
recently published a paper.
In his research paper, he mentions the importance
of data-driven decision making.
According to him, the digital leaders
recognize that data-driven decisions can greatly
improve the user experience and speed up decision making,
monetise valuable data, and unleash new business
opportunities.
And Looker fits perfectly into the data-driven insights.
Looker's mission statement is to empower people
through the smarter use of data.
And this wonderfully aligns with Google's mission statement,
which is to organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible and useful.
So the value of data is no longer in debate,
but data just isn't making some of the mundane tasks less time
and mind consuming.
For some, it's increasingly becoming
a part of their workflow.
So, for example, product managers
like us can now better understand product usage
to know when and where we need to invest in,
and what are the different opportunities for expansion
to delight current customers and to attract new ones.
So with that in mind, we spoke to our customers
and realized that they have three core business
needs, faster time to value, easy ways
to find data-driven insights, and access to insights
when and where they need them.
And this is where we, the Looker BI Team,
have been focusing and investing heavily.
Now Tej will walk you through some of the great things
we have been doing in the product in these three
key areas.
Tej, over to you.
TEJ TOOR: Thanks, Ani.
I'm excited to share a bit about how the Looker product is
innovating across the dimensions of Ani identified,
starting with how we've made it faster than ever
to find insights in Looker.
[INAUDIBLE] we've made it faster to get to content
you care about with the launch of our enhanced navigation
experience.
The new interface offers a convenient sidebar,
which provides quick and easy access to your recently
viewed content, your favorited content, your boards,
and folders.
This means that if you're on one dashboard
and want to hop over to another end, which
say is a dashboard you favorited or visited recently,
you can do that directly from the sidebar
without having to navigate through any intermediate pages.
You can also use the sidebar to scan through contents
of folders, making it much faster to get to that one
dashboard you're looking for in your team shared folder,
for example.
And once you get to that dashboard,
you can go ahead and collapse the sidebar
until you need it again.
So you can focus more on the content and less on the Chrome.
So enhanced navigation offers tremendous efficiency
improvements, which is wonderful.
But I'm particularly excited to share
that we've coupled these efficiency improvements
with performance improvements.
And are thrilled that switching between key pages
is up to five times faster with the new navigation.
The new navigation amplifies the usefulness of boards,
a valuable organizational tool.
For anyone who may be unfamiliar with boards,
boards are essentially curated sets of content.
Whereas a dashboard can only live in one single folder,
a dashboard can be pinned to any number of boards allowing
for tremendous flexibility.
You can divide a board into different sections, each
with its own description, to help
orient the end user to what's included on the board.
Boards can also be set as home pages
for specific groups of users based on user attributes.
So, for example, if you have a board
with a bunch of content relevant to sales managers,
as depicted in the example here, you
can very easily set that up to be the Looker home
page for all sales managers in your org.
That way, when a new sales manager joins the team
and hops into Looker for the first time,
she'll immediately see content that's
relevant to her and her job.
So with the launch of enhanced navigation,
boards have become even more useful
because you can now move between different sections of a board
and access the content within it directly from the main sidebar,
without even having to load the full board page.
So if there's content you use a lot, put it on a board.
It will make it so much easier for you and others
to come back to it.
But enhanced navigation isn't the only thing that's
gotten better about boards.
You can now pin any link to a board,
whether it's a dashboard, a look, and explore, or something
else, including external links.
So as you can see in the sales manager board here,
it contains not only dashboards, but links
to data apps and explorers that are relevant to sales managers.
So the board truly functions as a central hub
for thematic content and tools.
Our navigation enhancements have made it faster and easier
to get around the product, but we've
invested in making your analyses faster as well.
We've introduced quick starts to make it faster than ever
to explore in Looker, whether you are a seasoned analyst
or a brand new Looker user.
Quick Starts allow you to provide your Looker users
one-click access to some of the most common queries.
They appear on the Explore page, as pictured here,
so you can just click one of the thumbnails and land right
into an Explorer with fields and filters already pre-populated
to provide particular insights.
For users who are not super familiar with Looker's data
exploration interface, quick search
can be incredibly valuable in offering them
a prebuilt starting point that they can then tweak,
adding and removing fields, and changing filters as needed,
to find the exact answer they're looking for.
We've also heard that people who use the Explore page all day
every day love Quick Starts as well
and use them to save templates for types
of analyzes they find themselves building over and over.
Using Quick Starts enables them, for example,
to avoid having to configure the same sets of filters
repeatedly, instead allowing them to just save
those configurations in a Quick Start to grab and go as needed.
So you've built that analysis and now you want to share it.
We're also making it faster and easier
than ever to save content and make it available to others.
Now when saving an analysis as a new dashboard,
you'll be able to select which of the filters
from your analysis you want to make
available as global filters on that dashboard.
Looker will also automatically select the best filter styles
to apply on the dashboard based on the types of filters
you've selected.
We're also offering easier layout options
so you can spend more time on insights and less time
on formatting.
At Looker, we realized that everyone
can benefit from data, whether or not
you're in an analytical role.
And that's why we're making it easier
for anyone to find meaningful insights in their data.
So we love model data Looker, of course,
but we also realize that not everything belongs
in the model, specifically if it's a metric or calculation
to support a one-off particular analysis.
We are so excited about a number of improvements
to on-the-fly fields and calculations,
many of which we've launched already this year and several
that we're continuing to roll out.
With the addition of quick calculations,
any user on the Explore page can easily apply a common table
calculation to their results from the data table itself
without requiring any understanding of the data model
or custom syntax.
We've made it faster and easier to create other types
of on-the-fly fields as well.
Suppose your data is listed by state,
but you actually think about things in terms of regions.
Our new grouping functionality provides
a familiar and intuitive interface
to dynamically group fields based on the rules you define.
We've already seen a huge uptick in the number
of less technical users who are taking advantage
of this feature and we are thrilled to empower more people
to be able to view data in a way that
makes the most sense to them.
We've made it easier not just to interact with data
and build your analysis, but to find meaning in it.
Trend lines, now generally available,
make it easy to bring advanced insights
into your visualizations with a number of different trend type
options, including linear, logarithmic, polynomial, moving
average, and more.
And for users who want to look beyond their data,
our new in product forecasting tool does just that.
With just a few clicks, you can now easily add data projections
to your Explorer query to predict trends and monitor
specific data points.
Anyone can configure the forecasting model
through this simple UI with the ability
to specify forecast length, define
the bounds of forecasted data values,
and choose whether or not to include seasonality.
No experts to spreadsheets or complex formulas required.
And in the spirit of making more powerful insights
available to everyone, we've realized
that not everyone thinks about data
in terms of fields and filters, dimensions and measures.
So often, people just simply want the answer
to a specific question.
To that end, we are thrilled to announce
Ask Looker, a natural language interface
for asking and answering questions of Looker data.
Ask Looker provides users with an entirely new way
to interact with Looker, but still sits atop your trusted
model data sets.
And, as you can see in the example here,
makes it very clear exactly what is being used
to provide the results shown.
So there's no black box, but it's still pretty magical.
You can also configure synonyms to make sure
that Ask Looker is truly speaking the language
of your organization.
Ask Looker isn't the only new experience
we're providing to interact with your data.
Leveraging a familiar question and answer interface,
Guided Analyses offer a new take on data exploration
that is intuitive enough to be used by anyone.
These curated analytical experiences
are supported by extensive configurability under the hood,
allowing you to customize templates
for common analytical patterns to meet
the needs of your business users, who can then
use the Guided Analyses to quickly, flexibly, and easily
ask and answer questions of their data.
And with that, I'll pass it back to Ani to talk about some
of the capabilities we're investing in to make
data more ubiquitous than ever.
ANI JAIN: Thanks, Tej.
And finally, Looker has really invested, not just
in making data available to anyone,
but also making it available anywhere,
including in the applications of your choice.
So this year, we released our native mobile app for both iOS
and for Android.
And this was a big deal for us because in today's
digital world, we access data at all times,
no matter where we are.
We all rely on our mobile devices
today, especially for getting insights and information
about things that we really care about.
And we expect the same experience while we work.
So this Looker mobile app has an intuitive design
for quick data access.
It has enterprise level security with QR code authentication,
biometric authentication, and user level permissions.
You can easily share the content with one-tap, right
from your device.
And more importantly, it's available in 21 languages,
which is amazing.
Now if you want to learn more about Looker's mobile app
and everything that it can do, I highly
recommend that you attend the session, Introducing Looker
Mobile, here at Join at Home.
So we made it easier for you to find your data anywhere
you are.
But we're also making it easier for your data
to find you when you need it.
With enhanced alerts, alerts are more powerful than ever before.
And now they stay in sync with dashboard edits.
And we're also offering API access to alerts as well.
So developers can build on top of them.
And coming next year, we're excited to offer mobile alerts,
so you'll never have to miss an important notification.
So that is something the team is working on
and we are super excited to bring it to you in 2022.
We're also making it easier for users
to continue using the applications they
are familiar with, along with Looker.
As you all know, Looker's platform
offers a unified service to access
the truest, most up-to-date version of your company's data.
Looker's semantic model standardizes common metrics
and definitions for business users across multiple Google
applications, like Sheets and Slides.
So now users who are using Sheets and Slides
can easily import governed and secured data from Looker
and perform their analysis without leaving
their application.
So you can access your organization's trusted data
from Looker in Sheets and Slides, the applications
of your choice.
So these integrations will be available for use in 2022.
And we are very, very excited to work on them
and bring them to you next year.
Now that we have spoken about our customer needs and the work
we're doing in all these key areas,
we also wanted to talk to you about our package solution
and how you can accelerate your business with them.
Now that Looker is a part of Google Cloud,
we are working really hard on integrating across Google
products and solutions, so we can accelerate value for you
by delivering data experiences that
help you take action, optimize your workflows,
and augment your analytics.
First, we're helping you act more efficiently,
with Looker for Google Marketing Platform,
with an expanded offering for analyzing and activating
customer centric-data with new, out-of-the-box analytics
for Google Analytics 4, and new activation points for Google
Ads via customer match.
In addition, for businesses running on SAP,
Looker can now help customers understand their business
better and create actionable insights to meet evolving needs
and prepare for upcoming realities,
like new supply chain delivery channels, customer safety
expectations, location services, finance models, and much more.
Second, we're helping you optimize
your current and future investments
with our recently launched multi-Cloud Cost Management
block for granular visibility into Cloud
spend and BI capabilities for billing needs.
And we have Log Analytics solutions allowing customers
to apply business value and meaning to their log data
at scale across the company and across data volumes.
Third, we also have new ways to help
you expand the impact of augmented analytics powered
by Google Cloud.
We're expanding our support for Contact Center AI,
allowing you to more quickly visualize, analyze, and build
on data from cost centers AI's new Insights Export to BigQuery
with new Looker blocks for Insights and Agent Assist.
Also, customer leveraging Google Cloud's new Healthcare NLP API,
that turns raw patient notes into structured data,
can now quickly surface that data
within context of all of their healthcare data.
So with each of these updates, we're
working to make augmented analytics a reality for more
users by helping you leverage the power of advanced analytics
from Google.
So we're continuing to innovate on the core Looker product as
well as these type of integrations across Google
to help you more easily leverage the benefits
of a unified intelligent ecosystem.
Tej, back to you.
TEJ TOOR: As Ani mentioned at the start,
the way people use data and people's expectations of data
are fundamentally evolving.
As a Looker product, we have been
proud to stay not just ahead of but on top of these trends,
to continue to offer a differentiated value.
Thanks for listening, and we look forward to your questions.
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