Santa Cruz Works

"Looker?" asked the sales consultant over the roar of 5,000 entrepreneurs and engineers frantically canvassing the vendor hall at The Indus Entrepreneurs 2018 Inflect conference in Santa Clara. Pivoting in front of his company's neural-net mandala logo, he shrugged. In a way, the comment was to be expected. Ever since Gartner included it in the IT consultancy's Magic Quadrant of 20 top business-analytics providers, Looker has become a target. Recent entrants trying to catch up with the market leaders, moreover, are hyping their use of machine learning as the new killer app of business intelligence.