Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company, and Looker, the company that is powering data-driven businesses, today announced that they are integrating Looker’s business analytics with Qubole’s cloud-based big data platform, giving line of business users across organizations access to powerful, yet easy-to-use big data analytics.
Business units face an uphill battle when it comes to gleaning information from vast and disparate sources. Line of business users finds it challenging to extract, shape, and present the variety and volume of data to executives to help make informed business decisions. As a result, data scientists are overwhelmed with requests to access data or provide fixed reports to the line of business users, diverting their attention from gathering data insights through statistics and modeling techniques. Furthermore, line of business users become frustrated when they are forced to decipher the output of SQL aggregations created by data scientists.
Qubole and Looker are addressing this issue by integrating the Qubole Data Service (QDS) and Looker’s analytics data platform. The combination gives a line of business users instant access to automated, scalable, self-service data analytics without having to rely on or overburden the data science team – and without having to build and maintain on-premises infrastructure.
“Data has become essential for every business function across the enterprise, but most big data offerings are still too complicated for a line of business users to use, substantially reducing the business impact data can have,” said Ashish Thusoo, co-founder and CEO of Qubole. “Qubole and Looker have similar philosophies that it is essential for businesses to make insights accessible to as many people in an organization as possible to stay competitive. The integration of our offerings serves that very purpose.”
“Our customers are using Looker every day to operationalize their data and make better business decisions,” said Keenan Rice, Vice President of Alliances, at Looker. “Now with our support for Qubole’s automated, scalable, big data platform, businesses have greater access to their cloud-based data. At the same time, Qubole’s rapidly growing list of customers utilizes our data platform to find, explore and understand the data that runs their business.”
QDS is a self-service platform for big data analytics that runs on three major public clouds: Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure. QDS automatically provisions, manages, and scales up clusters to match the needs of a particular job, and then winds down nodes when they’re no longer needed. QDS is a fully managed big data offering that leverages the latest open source technologies, such as Apache Hadoop, Hive, Presto, Pig, Oozie, Sqoop, and Spark, to provide the only comprehensive, “everything-as-a-service” data analytics platform, complete with enterprise security features, an easy to use UI and built-in data governance.
