Some companies are just worth watching. Maybe they're doing something particularly novel, working in a new market space, or going about an old product line in a whole new way. Whatever the reason, Forrester Research is constantly on the lookout for such vendors, and recently placed the classification of Breakout Vendor on Looker.
More specifically, Forrester named Looker a Breakout Vendor in the big data integration market, noting that it could be a challenge to take the huge amounts of data that businesses generate and turn it into actionable insights. Looker, however, changes that by offering several mechanisms to help process all that raw data into the more usable forms. A set of business intelligence (BI) tools join a mechanism for adding Looker functions directly into applications to offer a framework to work from. Machine learning and a specifically-built modeling language known as LookML to offer structured query language abstraction to produce useful, worthwhile results.
Looker's CEO, Frank Bien, commented “We are proud to be recognized in the Breakout Vendor report as an innovator helping to solve some of the toughest challenges for companies wanting to unlock the value of their big data. Legacy BI and visualization tools are being left behind as business leaders are realizing the benefits of a modern data platform that weaves data and insights into every aspect of their business.”
It's been said before but it bears repeating: information by itself is really only valuable if it's actually used. It's easy to have lakes or silos or whatever metaphorical construct you care to use storing vast quantities of data. However, like the water in the lake or the grain in the silo, none of it is of any use until it's actually used. It's just data until it's put to work on current circumstances and the relevant nature of that data is found. Data is just data until it tells a business what products customers are buying and which they're not, or when a business needs to have more staff in place to accommodate sudden customer rushes, or any of hundreds of other possibilities.
Data is a valuable thing, but it's never valuable in isolation. Data is a great store of potential value, and until its potential is unleashed by big data analysis or tools like Looker's lineup, the end result is just a big pile of stuff businesses pay to keep on hand. With the right tools, however, the data can end up being a revenue stream rather than a cash sink.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
