So.. it's google analytics? Or a client for analytics? I still don't understand.

Why wouldn't this just be integrated into their existing platform?

This is a fully-fledged basic business intelligence tool, which can chart data from Google Analytics, Google Sheets and MySQL an series of other sources. It is a perfect free alternative to QlikView/Tableau for some simple data projects.

The Data Studio appears to be explicitly a dashboard service, but for any kind of data (which puts it in competition with services like Tableau). There is some overlap with Google Analytics and its native dashboards, but that's not a bad thing.

Oh god the dashboards in GA are so awful, I cringe whenever someone requests one.

Why are they terrible? Do they misrepresent the information?

My guess is that they are trying to make a data analytics platform for data in general, but the system integrates easily with their other data driven products.

The Google Analytics team built a dashboard tool, as part of their "Google Analytics 360" release. Other teams, including Cloud, then worked with them to make it available for other data sources, including Google BigQuery and MySQL.

I find it similar to PowerBI from Microsoft.

Except much, much, much less capable.

Agreed. PowerBI has so much more functionality - and more adding every month. And with the ability to use R to make charts, it has a lot more customizability.

Hopefully this the start of something very powerful.

Somewhat like Tableau, but in the cloud.

(Tableau may have a cloud version too, I'm actually not sure)

...in the cloud, hence it aims more at being a glue for the web. Merge datasources from anywhere, create joint reports, an incentive for everyone to open-up their data and make it accessible to Google. Sounds like a smart idea to place Google in the middle of the web.

Yep, Tableau does have a cloud version too - both private and hosted.

Also worth checking out is http://redash.io for this kind of stuff - fairly new but developing quickly and very easy to hack on/add stuff. Good docs, easy to deploy and has some nice auto-update reports bits. We use that quite heavily. Its open source/free to use but also comes with paid cloudy plans.

Thanks for mentioning Redash! (I'm the author) It's actually not that new -- I've been working on it for 3 years now :-)

I think this is their visualization platform for BigQuery

This just lets you make pretty dashboards/reports for google analytics and a bunch of other data.

So it's a reporting tool? All the link does is take me to the google sign in page.

Here's a non account-locked page: https://archive.fo/vkplk

Thanks. First big issue for me, it's US only. Why on earth does something like this need to be region locked?

Second is that it's hosted. That makes it a non-starter for enterprise reporting.

Probably no reason other than that it takes time and resources to go through all the steps necessary to launch in a region (e.g. localization, legal etc), and it's more effective to get feedback on a beta product early in one region than to delay for many.

I'm in Europe and it works just fine.

I didn't try it, just read the page:

>Data Studio is currently available to users in the United States and we’ll be rolling it out to other geographic regions throughout the year. We hope it helps you share more data and make better business decisions.

not working from Belgium: "Data Studio is not available in your country."

Works in Austria and Germany, though.

Interesting point: what if you work for someone in the US and want to collaborate on a report?

Or you work in the US but need to access / change a report while visiting a client in a country where it's not enabled...

Pretty lame.

FWIW it works in the Netherlands.

EU data protection can be in play ATM since they might not have this thing complaint, same goes for other regulations.

So the easy thing is to limit it to the US.

Working OK in the UK.

Compliant, as in complying with regulations?

Exactly. Because we in the EU do not want our customer data (be it personal identifiable information or not) to be transferred to the US without consent of our customers. And rightly so.

I am abbreviating massively here, but since the "Safe Harbor" things are actually a little bit more rough around data transfers.

Non the less Data Studio is available in Germany, as I have already used it. I might be limited on the data sources though.

Working in Brazil.

Not working in Ireland.

Works in Canada

I'm sure this is awesome. However if I were a f500 company using this (or in competition with one), I would be careful with what data I put into Google's cloud.

Given how many companies use Google Apps for Business, I think it's clear that they already trust Google with their data.

Why? Has Google ever done anything with their cloud services that cause you to distrust them?

Generally, the products Google offers for free involve them using the data you put into it to tailor their products and services to you. Not having examined the EULA, I don't know if this product is similar, but in general, that is the reason my legal department does not react nicely when projects try to bring google products into our ecosystem.

Yes, open them up to the NSA (and therefore other three letter agencies as well)

Not the PP, but though I have never come across anything substantive, there have been persistent rumors that Google M&A (and other) folks trawl through GMail to gain competitive advantages and negotiating leverage, particularly vs. startups.

OTOH, the rumors are most often of the "my 2nd cousin's mother-in-law's half-brother's secretary's boyfriend's ex-husband" variety, ie. not even anonymous 1st hand claims.

Anecdotally, these rumors seem to most often be spread by Enterprise SaaS salespeople.

I feel those rumors are just incorrect from my previous experience working in Google.

You are almost certainly right, but it is worth noting the considerable amount of FUD spread by interested parties that feeds into these sort of rumors.

OTOH, "The NSA has a backdoor into Google" used to be something only paranoids believed too...

Not just wrong but practically impossible.

Why impossible? Isn't mass data mining already in place for gmail in order to provide targeted ads?

Because Google's production systems aren't internally open like that, other teams can't just go grepping through production data systems (which is encrypted at rest anyway). Yes, there are obviously systems which do index data for search, spam prevention, etc, but those are guarded too, and the surface area of access is greatly reduced.

You can't just decide "Hey, I've got an idea for a cool 20% project, I'm going to try crawling all mail and looking for stock market tips". There is defense in depth, in terms of technical walls, as well as people walls, that makes something like that very unlikely. With tens of thousands of employees, it would be easy to get 1 rogue employee who could do serious damage with that kind of access.

Google takes data security and privacy very very seriously, and a breach of that magnitude would threaten hundreds of billions in valuation for a rather crazy risky idea for an M&A department?

Great, thanks for the taking the time to reply.

BTW, Google Ventures has a better way to do this which relies on public data, Project Sandhill.

By looking at data from Crunchbase, Angelist, etc you can get a deeper graph of the interrelationships in Silicon Valley. If I was looking at who to invest in, or M&A, I'd be looking at data like that, as well as talking with investors and people they've worked with.

Wouldn't this be the opposite of mass data mining?

"Which startups are good acquisition targets?" is very much a data-mining problem, though I would expect that noticing a startup experiencing "hockey stick" growth based on the growth of their Google Cloud Platform bill (or perhaps the # of users logging in with Google credentials, etc.) is much more likely than any Google employees (no matter how highly placed) trawling through Gmail looking for proprietary information.