Looker Here: Business Intelligence & New Hire

Expanding Our Business  Intelligence (BI) Solutions & Developer Team

As your business grows, so does your data. Many companies struggle–or simply don’t know–how to visualize data into tangible insight for their business or marketing strategy at the same rate as market speed. 

But now, as more businesses look to democratize insights to all employees, nothing is more top-of-mind than finding the right Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions to help every department become data-driven. 

That’s why–here at Crystalloids– we are welcoming Polina Salimyanova to our team. 

Polina joins as our Lead BI Developer and comes with seven years of experience executing BI data visualization tools for companies. With Crystalloids, Polina is eager to give businesses an upper-hand by helping them incorporate the best Google BI visualization tools into their organization. 

“Seven years ago I started in BI and worked with clients to have them understand what BI was and why they needed these tools,” Polina shared. 

“Today, clients know what BI is and they know it’s crucial so it is our job to be the experts and be able to provide them with the best BI options for their business,” Polina explains, noting that this is the value she hopes to add to the Crystalloids portfolio. 

To date, Polina has worked with technologies including Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle, and the Teradata warehouse. Now, she’s excited to learn the ins and outs of Google’s BI solutions. 

“I’ve always worked with different technologies…and I knew about Google products but after hearing about Google’s BI tools and solutions and what you can create…I got excited by the technology and opportunity to work with Google,” Polina said. 

At Crystalloids, Polina is investigating BI visualization technology that will “help businesses resolve issues, get new data insight, transform…and find different ways to approach a problem and solution.” 

According to Polina, Crystalloids has “such a technical team that covers the steps of processing data… and this is a good basement (foundation) to then build additional tools…including BI.” By joining the team, Polina imagines offerings in BI solutions as the closing loop of all clients' needs. 

Currently, Polina is developing her expertise with Google Cloud’s latest BI data visualization tools under the Looker Umbrella (Looker Studio, Looker Studio PRO, Looker). 

“Tableau (salesforce)...and power BI (microsoft) are BI tools I see clients using…with the goal to visualize data to gain better insights. But Looker is unique because of its semantic level. Looker can provide wider options and becomes more scalable as all operations are run through this level that Looker pulls from.” 

In learning Looker, and with her prior experience in BI, Polina has found that ”while all BI has some set of standard functionalities…Looker’s semantic and data-modeling layer makes customization more possible. On Looker, we can do difficult calculations without losing performance or speed to provide these insights, and because the market changes very quickly, you also need your insights quickly.” 

For Polina, the beauty of BI visualization tools (such as Looker) comes from their usefulness for everyone in the business hierarchy. 

“The beauty of BI is that it can be used in all sizes of businesses…and all levels of the hierarchy from top-level to end-users any problem can be solved via BI tools…BI is a source of communication…and visualization dashboards (like those on Looker Studio) help understand business and consumer behaviors.” 

With Crystalloids, Polina hopes to “attract new kinds of projects into the company related to BI visualizations, especially with Looker. Once we have those projects we can consider extending the team of BI developers and focus on their management.” 

But for now–having only been with Crystalloids and in The Netherlands for a month–Polina wants nothing more than to solidify her role in the company and bring value while also exploring the new place she calls home. 

“The Netherlands is very close to many countries, so it is easy to travel. First we want to travel up and down the Netherlands, then expand our borders…The Netherlands also has a huge number of interesting museums…I want to get to the Van Gogh Museum” says Polina. 

Having come from Belarus, Polina notes that two things have remained the same. “The weather in Belarus and NL is very similar and so is the architecture so I’ve adapted very fast to Rotterdam.”