A pending acquisition by Google LLC isn’t slowing down Looker Data Sciences Inc.

The business intelligence company today announced sweeping enhancements to its namesake platform that overhaul the user interface, improve integration with external applications and position it to go beyond visualizations to become an operational decision-making engine.

Looker 7 adds a new development framework for use in building operational applications, marking a major extension beyond the platform’s decision-support roots.

“Companies are using data in many more ways than reports and dashboards,” said Pedro Arellano, vice president of product marketing. He cited examples such price optimization engines that adjust prices in near-real-time according to demand and marketing bots that adjust bids on online advertisements based on performance. “We’re moving from BI to data experiences.”

The framework enables developers to customize data experiences within Looker and to embed them into other applications. In line with that, Looker is adding a developer portal with an assortment of tools as well as support for several new languages, including Typescript/Javascript, R, Python, Kotlin and Swift. A new code generator can create a language-specific software development toolkit for most other languages, Arellano said.

Looker is also adding integrations with file-sharing services from Dropbox Inc., Box Inc. and Google Drive as well as Auger.ai machine learning and mParticle Inc.’s data orchestration. In line with the expanded focus on developers, the company is also establishing its first-ever marketplace to house applications, integrations, plug-ins, templates, data sources and custom visualizations built by members of its developer ecosystem. The directory will initially be available only to customers and will have no e-commerce capabilities.

The other major enhancement area is in the user interface, where developers and users are getting greater flexibility to build customized experience. Dashboards are getting configurable filtering options such as cross-filtering, in which a change in one window dynamically affects others on the screen. Enhancements to SQL Runner, a front-end for the popular query language, make it possible for users to see visualization results interactively as they write a query.

Taken together, the UI enhancements are intended to span the range “from white-labeling the experience to fully customizing from scratch to building a unique experience and everything in between,” Arellano said.

Other goodies include connections to more than 45 new data sources, closed-loop integration with Slack Technologies Inc.’s collaboration platform and an analytical alert feature (pictured) that notifies users of important changes to their data via Slack, email, text and other options.

On the administration side, Looker can now be run within portable software containers managed by the Kubernetes orchestration platform. “This won’t necessarily be noticed by users but will be enormously useful in deploying and maintaining the product,” Arellano said.

New system activity analytics enable administrators to monitor user behavior, adoption and performance issues. A variety of new security certifications have also been achieved.

Looker 7 features will begin rolling out this month, with all features ready for customer testing by the end of the first quarter of 2020.

Image: Looker