I'm the CPO at a SaaS data catalog and analysis hub company called data.world - I was at the Snowflake Summit when the Looker acquisition by Google was announced - the guys at their booth seemed pretty happy ;)
With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings into more of the business. We talk to companies every day that have made massive investments in data warehouses, viz tools, and high-paid data scientists, but they still aren't agile enough because they can't tie it all together so their people can find and use the right data when they need it. I read an article once about the failure of self serve BI and the reality is that you just end up creating more sprawl. People need tools to reduce the clutter and sprawl and stop the endless chain of emails trying to figure out what table to look at or query to use or if your source is still updating.
We built our data catalog and analysis hub for exactly this, and it's extremely validating to see the big guys like Salesforce and Google investing in expanding the user base of big data tools and I really hope we can be part of the solution of sorting it all out!
I disagree with you! Looker is more advanced, and that does not mean it is better. Tableau’s tools were MUCH easier for me to make ad hoc analyses with, as well as to create dashboard with. Yes, there were some transformations that I couldn’t apply and had to go to custom SQL or ETL for, but the total time to finish my analyses and produce high-quality live dashboards was much less than with Looker.
(I don’t know why you are being downvoted though, you’re entitled to an opinion same as me)
With Google snapping up Looker ($2.6B) for Google Cloud, Salesforce's much bigger purchase of Tableau is a clear sign that the big guys see buying BI tools is a good way to expand the reach of their offerings into more of the business. We talk to companies every day that have made massive investments in data warehouses, viz tools, and high-paid data scientists, but they still aren't agile enough because they can't tie it all together so their people can find and use the right data when they need it. I read an article once about the failure of self serve BI and the reality is that you just end up creating more sprawl. People need tools to reduce the clutter and sprawl and stop the endless chain of emails trying to figure out what table to look at or query to use or if your source is still updating.
We built our data catalog and analysis hub for exactly this, and it's extremely validating to see the big guys like Salesforce and Google investing in expanding the user base of big data tools and I really hope we can be part of the solution of sorting it all out!