Continuing its recent campaign to expand into functional specialties, Looker Data Sciences Inc. today is rolling out an extension to its business intelligence platform targeted specifically at sales professionals.

Looker for Sales Analytics joins Looker for Digital Marketing and Looker for Web Analytics, which were both introduced last October and which enter general availability this week. The company is also announcing additional developer tools and its first open source repository for Looker extensions.

Looker, which has raised a healthy $280 million in venture financing, positions its platform as the next generation of BI, with support for a broad range of back-end databases, access to operational data and high scalability. The company says its platform can eliminate much of the delay and manual labor involved in transforming data and loading it into a dedicated BI database.

The Sales Analytics extension is currently for use only with the Salesforce.com Inc. customer relationship management system. Looker won’t close the door on supporting other CRM platforms in the future, but said none are planned. “If demand is there we’d be happy to support additional platforms, but there’s no firm timeline on that, said said Daniel Mintz, the company’s chief data evangelist.

The application complements Salesforce.com by pulling data about such sales metrics as quota attainment, pipeline (pictured) and deal status into a dashboard where rich visualizations can be applied. “This can be up and running in an hour or two,” Mintz said.

A set of preconfigured visualizations is included and users can also customized using the company’s LookML visualization language or in the administrative interface. “None of this is a black box,” Mintz said. “It’s a prebuilt app that gives you full customization.”

At the same time, the company is responding to requests from developers for more control by adding a software development kit that supports JavaScript. Developers can now use JavaScript to get fine-grained control over IFrames, which are HTML documents that are embedded inside other HTML documents. IFrames are used to display multiple visualizations in a single dashboard.

Using the SDK developers can, for example, display multiple windows in a dashboard that automatically update based upon changes to each other. Previously, frames could only interact with their parent pages.

The new open source library, which is being launched on GitHub, will showcase third-party projects that extend and enhance the Looker platform. Developers may submit their creations for evaluation, but the number of published projects will be limited, Mintz said. “We want to be sure applications are fully functional and people will support them,” he said. The library is launching with just three projects that are aimed at enforcing consistent coding practices, keeping code clean and moving dashboards and reports between instances.

The Looker for Sales Analytics application is available now in beta test  for customers who request it. The JavaScript Embed SDK is expected to be available at the end of April.

The company declined to specify pricing.

Image: Looker