Looker brings big data sets to your dashboard

Business intelligence company Looker has launched a new data-exploration platform — a way to visualize and sort massive amounts of big data.

The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company, which specializes in big data analytics for enterprise, said its product will allow analysts to manipulate and explore big data sets with ease.

Weeding through relevant data is enhanced, Looker chief executive Frank Bien told VentureBeat, with Looker’s D3 visualization library, which allows users to identify and process complex data with graphs and charts.

Above: Looker’s new interface.

Image Credit: Looker

Bien said his two year-old company is “making large and complex data sets accessible to business owners. Big data has little value if there’s a disconnect.” Bien said that as it stands now, business intelligence solutions only offer consumers sifting through massive sets of information a partial ability to pare what’s important and discard the rest.

Looker provides data scientists a platform that makes tangible sense of the data crucial for growing IT enterprises through your browser.

As for the current focus for data providers arguing that eliminating data scientists from the equation is necessary, Bien said taking away the human dynamic makes little sense. “We’re not removing data scientists from the equation. We think eliminating data scientists is stupid.”

Bien and company face stiff competition from a host of companies in the business intelligence and big data space, including Tableau, Qlik, SAP Business Objects, Birst, and Domo. New Relic, a big data operator who counts Microsoft, Nike, NBC, and Sony as clients, currently does application performance management but is also branching out into usable visualizations of big data inside customizable dashboards, and it will be helped by a recent $100M round.

Looker currently has 100 customers, mostly large e-commerce operators, ad tech companies, and virtual gaming outfits. Looker clients typically pay between $2,000 and $10,000 in subscription fees, depending on data loads. Bien said Looker distinguishes itself from competitors because synthesized data is available to customers on its dashboard in an easy-to-follow and easy-to-read format.

“Visualization becomes a entry point. We’re allowing much deeper exploration of data,” he said.

Looker was founded by Lloyd Tabb, a former senior engineer at Netscape. The company has been backed by Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital and PivotNorth Capital.