Cloud giant Google (GCP) has acquired data platform provider
’Looker’. Looker, which has headquarters in Santa Cruz, California, United States, was established in 2012. Its ‘Looker Platform for Data’ offers workflow insights and enables users to “extract value from their data”. The company caters to more than 1,500 companies globally and these include big names like Amazon, IBM, and Spotify. Alongside Santa Cruz it has a presence in Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco and New York in the United States, and offices in London, United Kingdom; Dublin, Ireland; and Tokyo, Japan. Looker specializes in a range of areas including ‘Big Data’, business intelligence, and analytics. Google’s acquisition of Looker reportedly cost in the region of $2.6 billion.
The acquisition was funded through ‘Capital G’ - the venture fund arm of Google’s parent body ‘Alphabet’. It is the first major move by Thomas Kurian. Mr. Kurian replaced Diane Greene as SVP of Google Cloud on November 16, 2018, and underscores his plans for Google Cloud’s expansion (which includes taking market share from AWS). Looker’s services work on a number of clouds and its business-intelligence option integrates with databases other than those that drive Google’s offerings. These include Microsoft’s Azure SQL Server and Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Redshift. It was announced that this functionality would continue post-acquisition.
“Looker extends our business analytics offering with two important capabilities—first, the ability to define business metrics once in a consistent way across data sources,” explained Thomas Kurian on the GCP blog. “This makes it easy for anyone to query data while maintaining consistent definitions in their calculations, ensuring teams get accurate results. Second, Looker also provides users with a powerful analytics platform that delivers applications for business intelligence and use-case specific solutions such as Sales Analytics, as well as a flexible, embedded analytics product to collaborate on business decisions. The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will help us offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualizing results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows”.
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