Google Plans to Acquire Looker to Enhance Its BI and Analytics Capabilities for Enterprise Customers

Search engine giant Google has entered into an agreement to acquire data analytics platform Looker and will spend a whopping $2.6 billion in all-cash transaction. The acquisition of Looker will bolster Google’s analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities for enterprise customers. As per the announcement, the deal is expected to close later this year, and Looker will become part of Google Cloud, assisting the search engine’s cloud analytics capabilities to better vie with major cloud players AWS and Azure. This move is the first major acquisition for new Google CEO Thomas Kurian, and Google’s recent multi-cloud strategy shift that has comprised the release of Anthos, a rebranded Google Cloud Services platform which plays nice with AWS and Azure. In its statement, Google says, “the deal builds on an existing partnership where the two companies share more than 350 customers, including BuzzFeed, Hearst, and Yahoo.” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian shines a light over their move, “Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making.” According to him, “The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation. We remain committed to our multi-cloud strategy and will retain and expand Looker’s capabilities to analyze data across Clouds.”  

Looker Offerings Overview

Based in Santa Cruz, California, Looker is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform helping customers to explore, assess and share real-time business analytics easily. The company, founded in 2011, offers a visualization tool that assists customers spot trends and draws other lessons from their data. In BI and data analytics marketplace, Looker competes with tools like Tableau and Microsoft Corp’s Power BI. Looker is also assisting companies to visualize and make sense of their huge amount of data by tapping such myriad sources including AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and MySQL. Since its inception, the company had clinched around $300 million, following a Series D round of $81.5 million in 2017, which was led by Capital G – the Google parent company Alphabet’s investment wing. Earlier, Looker had been seen to compete with Periscope Data, a BI startup which was recently taken by business analytics vendor Sisense.  

Google’s Move Towards BI and Data Analytics

As the deal between Google and Looker represents Kurian’s first cloud acquisition since he replaced Diane Greene in last November, it’s also the latest move in a line of recent cloud announcements by Google that is aimed at helping the search engine platform to draw near with public cloud market leader, AWS. This latest acquisition will further empower Looker to focus more on the state-of-the-art graphical user interface, which includes a conversational interface, natural language generation, and augmented analytics. Looker CEO Frank Bien says, “Now, we’ll have greater reach, more resources, and the brightest minds in both analytics and cloud infrastructure working together to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners. Together, we are reinventing what it means to solve business problems with data at an entirely different scale and value point.”