Business intelligence company Looker Data Sciences Inc. will use its Join user conference today to announce a major overhaul of its core platform, including the addition of functional applications and new visualizations.

The company, which raised a huge $81 million funding round in March, has been gaining momentum with its promise to simplify data extraction processes by pulling in data directly from multiple sources and making it easy to embed its visualizations in other applications.

The last major overhaul of the Looker platform nearly a year ago focused on expanding the number of supported data sources. The new release, called Looker 5, “is about making things easy,” said Daniel Mintz, Looker’s chief data evangelist. One way the company is doing that is with the Action Hub, a feature that enables users to interact with other applications from within the Looker dashboard.

For example, users can spin up services in the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud, export to Salesforce.com Inc.’s customer relationship management platform or start and stop a Google Inc. Adwords campaign from within Looker. Previously, such operations required an intermediary server. Additional target platforms will be supported through middleware tools.

New specialty visualization blocks are available on the cloud service for the first time. Previously, they were available only on the on-premises edition. “We’l have about 10 visualization types when we launch and a whole bunch of options for gathering feedback about other visualizations customers want,” Mintz said. A new “Viz Block” provides 10 new visualization types with more to come.

“Data Blocks” provide a set of pre-modeled external data sets with pre-formatted information that users can import to their Looker models. “We give you the data and the model, in a format that’s available for every database that we support,” Mintz said. Initial data blocks will include weather data dating from 1939, census data at city block level, key economic indicators and geographic mapping.

Weather data has particular applications to online retailers, Mintz said. He cited online ticket broker SeatGeek Inc., which used weather data to identify relationships between tickets posted for outdoor events and inclement weather. The insights enabled the company to adjust its pricing for such events.

The company’s application directory is expanding with custom applications for marketing analytics, information technology operations and event analytics. The applications are essentially customized, function-specific Looker dashboards. The company is also brushing up its data merge, data tools, SQL Runner and security features, along with adding support for the Apache Druid columnar distributed database. More than 50 new statistical functions are included.

Looker 5 is scheduled to be available in October. The cloud version is available on the subscription basis at prices beginning at $3,000 per month for 10 users.

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