Search engine market leader Google acquires Looker Data Sciences, an intelligence platform, for a reported $2.6 billion (£1.9bn) in an all-cash deal which was announced today.
This is the largest acquisition for Alphabet since 2014 when it paid $3.2 billion (£2.46bn) for smart home company Nest. The acquisition is likely to be intended to bolster Google Cloud’s growth under the new Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian who said at a February 2019 conference according to CNBC “You will see us accelerate the growth even faster than we have to date.”
“Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on-premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.
Google acquires Looker after another recent acquisition of Alooma which has enabled the Google Cloud Data Fusion data pipelining tool. Signs that Google is ramping up its cloud service offerings.
Lookers’ business-intelligence tool works on multiple clouds in addition to Google’s and integrates with other databases that compete with Google’s own products or did compete with Google’s own products.
It will give Google Cloud customers a new analytics tool and allow them to analyse data in a consistent manner across various sources while providing Google with industry-specific analytics for its targeted verticals.
Google aren’t the only people acquiring Cloud companies, it’s become quite a trend recently with Salesforce acquiring major players MuleSoft, Tableau, and Vlocity while Insight partners have recently completed a deal to acquire Veeam – a Swiss cloud backup and data management provider.
This purchase is intended to help Google get a higher market share. The market for business intelligence is huge and is ballooning at a rapid rate with IDC stating: “Worldwide revenue for big data and business analytics (BDA) solutions was $166 billion, up 11.7% over 2017 and [would] reach $260 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9%.”.
At the end of 2018 Google had 7.6% of the cloud market share which is small compared to Microsoft who had 13.7% and Amazon who had a whopping 32% according to a report from Canalys.
Google acquires Looker after its announcement of its new product, Anthos, which enables customers to run computing workloads on multiple clouds. The combination of these recent mergers will make an interesting scene to watch and should see some exciting new product and service releases from Google’s Cloud.
If Google can keep Looker’s talent on board and keep consistent with growth, this merger may give Google the market share it’s needed in the Cloud and give them the edge over competitors. Then again, Google might already be eyeing up the competitors.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud Platform is a provider of computing resources for deploying and operating applications on the web. Its specialty is providing a place for individuals and enterprises to build and run the software, and it uses the web to connect to the users of that software.
About Looker
Looker Data Sciences was an American computer software company headquartered in Santa Cruz, California before its merger with Google Cloud Platform. Looker marketed a data exploration and discovery business intelligence platform.
