Google adds data analyticis and visualisation chops
Google has announced that it is acquiring data analytics firm Looker for $2.6 billion. It will be Google’s third-largest purchase in its 21-year history and biggest since Nest deal in 2014.
It will also be the first major deal for Thomas Kurian, who joined the company last year as the head of Cloud division.
“We’re very excited to announce that Google has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Looker, a unified platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics,” Kurian said in a blog post.
“The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will help us offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualising results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows,” he added.
“It will also help us deliver industry specific analytics solutions in our key verticals, whether that’s supply chain analytics in retailing; media analytics in entertainment; or healthcare analytics at global scale.”
Looker is a privately held big data analytics firm headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. Since its founding in 2012, the company has raised $281 million in venture capital funding. Last year, it was valued at $1.6 billion in a funding round.
The firm currently has a workforce of around 800 people.
The new deal will add Looker to Google Cloud division, which currently ranks third after Amazon and Microsoft in cloud infrastructure market.
In a media briefing on the deal, Looker’s CEO Frank Bien said that from the very beginning, Looker was trying to disrupt the “pretty staid ecosystem of data visualisation tools and data prep tools that companies were being forced to build solutions.”
He said that the company currently serves more than 1,600 customers and has also crossed the $100 million revenue run rate. On the top of that, Looker’s revenue is growing 70 per cent year-over-year, Bien claimed.
The current deal builds on an existing partnership between Looker and Google, which share more than 350 customers including Hearst Communications, Blue Apron Holdings, Buzzfeed, and WPP Essence.
“The combination of Google Cloud’s BigQuery and associated data infrastructure and Looker’s platform for innovative data solutions will reinvent what it means to solve business problems with data at an entirely different scale and value point,” wrote Bien in a blog post.
Bien continued: “The combination of Google Cloud’s BigQuery and associated data infrastructure and Looker’s platform for innovative data solutions will reinvent what it means to solve business problems with data at an entirely different scale and value point.”
“Together, we’ll have better 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. The mission that we undertook as Looker is a giant one – and with Google Cloud, our ability to complete that mission is significantly enhanced.”
However, while the two companies have been “close partners” for more than four years, Looker will remain a multi-cloud player and won’t be locked into the Google Cloud, Bien was keen to assert.
“Looker customers can expect continuing support of all cloud databases like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and more [and] Looker partners can expect to continue to work with us as they have before,” wrote Bien.
The deal is not expected to face antitrust scrutiny, Kurian believes, because Google will buy software, not data, and will also allow other rival cloud services, including Amazon, to connect to the software purchased.
Both companies expect the deal to be approved before the end of the year.
Bien will likely stay with Google and report to Kurian after completion of Looker’s purchase.