In August, I wrote about why Omni’s technology reinvents BI once more. The Omni founding team hails from Looker & Stitch. They’ve set out to solve the problems customers faced with the previous generation of BI.

Today, I can show you what this means in practice because Omni is commercially available.

Anyone who has managed a larger BI deployment has faced the challenge of managing hundreds, perhaps thousands of metrics. As more users calculate figures, consistency across teams becomes a company-wide challenge.

Marketing & sales define revenue or leads or cost-of-customer acquisition differently. In the BI tool, a marketing analyst finds three metrics: cost_of_customer_acq, CAC2, & new_CAC. Which is the right one to use? Data brawls - disputes between teams about metrics definitions - break out.

Omni solves these problems.

In the video above, a data analyst writes SQL to understand the business’ customers’ buying behavior. Omni identifies the metrics calculated by the query & surfaces them in the toolbar. The analyst creates a new field, Total Sales Sum, with the UI then filters the output by country. Last, Omni visualizes the data.

Omni enables an analyst to calculate a metric, promote it to a top-level field within a notebook, & then broadcast it to the entire organization - all without writing LookML or any other modeling language.

Workflows exist for metrics management. The BI team and the CFO may decide they would like to approve this metric before the business declares it the gold-standard.

This subtle workflow innovation cascades into deceptively large organizational change.

Users define metrics at the edge of the organization: the marketing team, the sales team, the operations team. Teams refine metrics over time, then promote them to the entire organization after approval.

Technical analysts can build models from code if they prefer crafting the data model from the bottom-up also.

Both paths lead to beautiful & interactive visualizations that use modern technologies to render quickly.

Omni picks up where the previous generation of BI left off : enabling organizations to define metrics, promote them to the company, then manage thousands of metrics while moving with the confidence of consistency across teams. Give it a try here.