Omni looks to take on Looker with its cloud-powered BI platform

techcrunch.com:

There’s been an explosion of business intelligence (BI) tools in recent years, or tools that analyze and convert raw data into info for use in decision making. Investments in them are on the rise, but companies are still struggling to become “data-driven” — at least, according to some survey results. NewVantage Partners’ 2022 poll of chief data and analytics officers found that less than half (47.4%) believed that they’re competing on data and analytics. They cited company culture and the overwhelming growth of data as the top blockers, as well as concerns over data ownership and privacy.

Colin Zima believes that there’s another major challenge businesses adopting BI tools have to overcome: poor usability. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a BI platform that aims to simplify working with data across an organization. As such, Zima might not be incredibly impartial. But on the other hand, he’s a longtime participant in the data analytics community, having worked at Google on the Search quality team and at Looker as the chief analytics officer and VP of product.  

“In an era where every employee is expected to be a data user, getting the basics done is still way too hard: Looking up data across many different systems or waiting on the data team to pull data or being forced to learn structured query language (SQL) to answer questions,” Zima said. “The reality is business users need great, simple tools to do their jobs better and data teams need powerful tools to manage that process and do high-value work that complements core reporting.”

Zima co-launched Omni in early 2022 alongside Jamie Davidson and Chris Merrick, who spent several years at Looker and Stitch, respectively, before joining the startup. The three co-founders