Looker Adds Amazon Redshift and RDS Support

Looker Data Sciences Inc. announced support for Amazon Redshift and Relational Database Service (RDS).

Customers can implement a cloud BI solution that combines Looker’s data discovery platform with the flexibility of AWS infrastructure, enabling storage and analytics of business data.

It’s easy to manage. Its web-based data discovery platform provides leverage for data analysts and promotes collaborative, curiosity-driven analytics throughout any business. The company complements the cloud infrastructure on AWS by relying on the underlying database for query processing. Customers can build their own big data cloud on AWS, then use Looker to take advantage of the power and of AWS database services – without any need to move, re-architect, or unsecure their data for analytics.

“Looker gives us a completely new way to explore our data and collaborate on insights and solutions across our company. We tried other vendors’ solutions, but none could offer the combination of flexibility, power, and ease-of-use that Looker does,” said Daniel Mintz, director of business intelligence, Upworthy (Cloud Tiger Media, Inc.) “By combining Looker with Amazon Redshift, we get the most from our cloud infrastructure and applications: virtually unlimited scalability, affordable cost, and an intuitive end-user experience that makes it possible for all our employees to dig into our data for insights.”

To stay competitive, companies are shifting to cloud infrastructures, with worldwide spending on public IT cloud services expected to soar from $47.4 billion in 2013 to more than $107 billion in 2017, according to IDC.

By using the service with Amazon Redshift or RDS, businesses can match the agility of cloud infrastructure with a BI platform that will keep them ahead of the curve and adapt to rapidly evolving business demands.

“The business intelligence industry missed an innovation cycle by not evolving to take advantage of cloud infrastructure, fast analytic databases, and modern web technologies,” said Frank Bien, CEO, Looker. “Today’s business leaders and data innovators were raised on the web, and they’re looking for tools that work the way the web works. Looker has completely re-architected the BI stack for this new wave of curiosity-driven businesspeople.”

“We’re pleased to see Looker add support for Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS to its innovative cloud-based BI platform,” said Brian Matsubara, head of global technology alliances, AWS. “Used together, these technologies enable customers to benefit from the performance, ease-of-use, scalability and low price of Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS, as well as Looker’s rich data discovery and BI capabilities.”

Support for Redshift takes advantage of the analytical and performance benefits of Redshift, a managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. Looker’s 100% in-database approach enables data analysts to access data in near real-time, exploring the entire dataset directly in Redshift and increasing the speed of query performance. They can build models on top of any Redshift dataset, transforming data on the fly and building models from raw data in minutes.

The support for RDS combines the web-based approach to BI with the ease of creating an analytical infrastructure that’s scalable and easy to manage. Customers can set up analytical environments that are 100% in the cloud, then distribute a browser-based experience that enables anyone in the organization to access the data they need to make smart business decisions. Customers can deploy the solution within their AWS Security Groups and add resources via AWS to Redshift and RDS for scalable, high-performing big data analytics.