My company shares a lot of customers with Looker, and from my point of view there’s a couple reasons why they’re so successful.<p>First, Looker has two layers. The dashboard layer gives you tables, charts and filters. The explore layer allows you to go in and build your own pivot tables off the same underlying models. No other BI tool has built an explore layer that’s as successful in practice as Looker’s.<p>Second, the underlying model of both layers is written in code and under version control. This probably makes sense to most HN readers but in the BI world this is very contrarian. If you ask most business users who make BI purchasing decisions, version control and pull requests are the last thing they’ll ask for. But it turns out it’s exactly what you need to maintain a complex BI deployment.
Tableau is the best at getting non-technical users to be instantly productive, and is completely unmatched in pure analytical abilities and visualizations. They aren't standing still here either.<p>However Tableau has absolutely screwed up their evolution into a cloud-based service. The current single-user desktop software with client/server design is painful and archaic, and the Tableau cloud is just a hosted server run on undersized hardware. They are losing a lot of business renewals because of this, even if the consultancy and enterprise deals will keep going for awhile.
Not really a threat. this article is mostly about Looker, which is a very different product with a significantly higher entry level price tag. Tableau on the other hand is part of the curriculum in many information science programs in colleges, and is significantly embedded in the enterprise sector. it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part or a black swan type of event to dislodge them any time soon.
This is another "Forbes Contributor" post. This means that it's just a blog post, though, admittedly, Cohan is a smart guy.<p>Does anyone else think Forbes should do more to separate volunteer content from editorially directed and reviewed journalistic content? Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand?<p>It feels like, to me, someone saying "I went to Stanford" in a conversation because they walked on the campus. Just because Forbes hosts the content doesn't mean it's at the same quality as a true Forbes spawned story.<p>Since the Forbes.com front page appears to now be almost 3/4 contributors, I guess it's working for them. Still feels wrong.
I'm not sure the analysis front-end is really where the money is at. There are lots of industries that have trouble getting their data to a place where it can be analyzed at all. I know some very successful companies here in flyover country that picked a sector where this is a problem and made a business of fixing it.
Forbes seems to be 95% ads now.<p>Not just the content. I went on the page and a huge 3/4 page banner scrolled my view, then another popped into the side, then Forbes had a pop over asking for my email.<p>Yikes!
Growing a startup '70%' is very different to running a publicly listed global company<p>'...Looker is trying to become cash flow positive -- and its revenues are growing faster than its headcount. "We have visibility to cash flow break even over the next couple of years. We plateaued in spending. We now have 600 employees and expect to add 200 in 2019. We are seeing our cash burn rate decline," he explained.'
Has anyone used Arcadia Data (the other company mentioned in the article) and have thoughts on it? I work in BI and had never heard of it before reading this.
Just exited a company the was competitive to Tableau and Looker. The BI space is insanely competitive, the lock in is very deep, and there are a thousand small players swimming in the wake of Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, and a few other "owners" of the category.<p>Looker doesn't threaten Tableau. It doesn't need to--at least for now. The space is growing at a crazy rate.
Surprised nobody here mentioned Mode Analytics.<p>Unlike Looker or Tableau, it requires users to know SQL.<p>That said: if you're an org where the business people know SQL or are willing to learn--Mode is clean, simple, and super powerful.<p>My company had a great experience with this. Our COO was super proficient with Excel. I showed him basic SQL, he loves it and has learned quickly. The jump from Excel power user to SQL user is totally doable, and probably most people making custom reports are already at least in the former category!<p>Additionally, a few of us have substantial Pandas experience: Mode makes it trivial to go from SQL to a Jupyter like notebook w Pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn etc all already there--no need for Python version or dependency hell. Zero devops at any layer below the raw datastore (MySQL / Redshift / etc).<p>It's really nice. You write code purely against open standards--SQL, pandas etc. Looker uses a proprietary query language, LookML. I am not tempted to go learn it.
Anyone checked PowerBI from Microsoft? I think it's a great BI solution that isn't widely known yet.<p>Example: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA</a>
There is lots of opportunity still to innovate in this space. We are focusing on making it super easy to create great looking charts and dashboards really easily at Chartly [1].<p>Personally I am surprised by lots of the "state of the art" options out there where the result is EITHER ugly or HARD TO USE.<p>We still have a ways to go, but you can create good looking, interactive dashboards with our platform very easily.<p>Here is an example of a dashboard with NFL data: <a href="https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard" rel="nofollow">https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard</a><p>[1] <a href="https://chart.ly" rel="nofollow">https://chart.ly</a>
My company uses Looker a lot. It's fairly good. My only complaint is that its web-native interface makes it AWFULLY slow to do the simplest things.