Feature
Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Looker continues to push its modular approach to business analyticsinto, well, any crack or crevice in the enterprise that can be improved by analytics. Its MO is to deliver products that allow companies to embed analytics in websites, portals, apps and even bots.
And now, business units and departments — via its latest product, Looker Data Apps.
These are prepackaged applications that model what earlier Looker customers have built using Looker's architecture and its components of business logic, Looker Blocks.
Looker Data Apps are basically data applications built for, say, a sales manager that borrow from multiple sources of data to give him a complete view into his piece of the enterprise, CEO Frank Bien told CMSWire.
A Quadrillion Sales Apps on the Market
Here, the obvious question is, what can Looker add to what is already available on the market? If there is any application space saturated with offerings it would be sales management.
Looker Data Apps are different, Bien insisted. "We are taking data from a lot of different applications and mashing it all together to make sense of what is happening in the sales pipeline in a cohesive way."
What Worked Before For Warby Parker Et Al
"Our app might include how the customer is performing in the after-sale environment with customer service, or whether the cost of the sale was greater than expected," he said. An app for the customer retention team might include data on how are customers are interacting with their new products and whether their purchases are growing or not after the sale.
"These are different data elements combined in ways that sophisticated customers using Looker have tried out and found to be successful." Looker borrowed (with permission of course) from the experiences of such companies as Kohler, Gilt Groupe, HubSpot, Warby Parker, Sony and Yahoo to build its Data Apps, he explained.
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Looker itself did much of the work in combining these companies' data streams to build the product that these companies wanted. James Sandora, director of Digital Strategy & Integration at Kohler, said that Looker collaborated with it to build what he called a "universal interface" into all of its data include data from third parties.
"We can make even faster, more well-informed decisions than before," Sandora said."It's been so positive that we plan to integrate this capability within many other business functions."
Looker can work with hundreds of sources, Bien said. "The common theme to the Data Apps is that they are all about how the user consumes data."
Some Customization Required
If it sounds as thoughthe Data Apps are not fully baked— that is, they are not out-of-the-box ready to go — that is because they are not. Unless the user wants a very basic set up using popular applications like Salesforce.com and Marketo, there will be some degree of integration required,Bien said
That said, Looker has given customers good starting points with its Data Apps. It has eight apps by department: sales, customer success, customer support, marketing, operations and logistics and web analytics.
There are five industry-specific apps: e-commerce, digital media analytics, digital advertising analytics, gaming and software-as-a-software.
