What could have led Google to buy Looker and what can come out of this deal?
How do you up your game in the competitive world of Data and Analytics? Well, one way is through acquisition.
Google recently acquired Looker, a SantaCruz-based data analytics startup, for a whopping $2.6 billion. The all-cashdeal was the fourth-biggest in Google’s history and this has helped GoogleCloud close the gap in the cloud space market against Amazon (Amazon WebServices) and Microsoft (Azure).
Looker was set up in 2012 and uses big datato assist companies to retain consumers and understand their behavior. WithLooker’s assistance, video game developers like King, the makers of CandyCrush, have been able to retain their players and media outlets like TheEconomist can better strategize their subscriber model.
What is Looker?
Looker’s cloud-based platform has twocomponents –
- A powerful modeling platform that helps the developers by crawling target databases to generate baseline data models. That happens through an SQL-like modeling language which the user uses to ‘codify’ the data.
- End-user visualisation tool provides self-service analytics – allowing for quick analysis of data by analysts, marketers and business owners.
But what could have led Google to buyLooker and what can come out of this deal? We look at three possibilities:
An Upgrade
The acquisition will likely see a significant upgrade to Google’s data management ecosystem. Looker would make it easy for Google Cloud to build a data exploration platform at enterprise level, building on their Google Data Studio offering. In the same way that Tableau and Microsoft Power BI do, Looker could quickly make data accessible for the entire organization as a bolt on for Google Cloud.
What do I mean by that? Simply put: a toolfor business users and to find insights in their otherwise unwieldy datasets.Looker will allow users to quickly access petabytes of data through GoogleCloud Service’s products, such as BigQuery. One of the true powers of this typeof integration is going to be in accessing Machine Learning Capabilities (BigQuery Machine Learning), that allows creating and deploying machine learningmodels simple. Looker will most likely increase the pace of model developmentand allow business users to get to learning much faster.
DiversificationThrough Acquisition
With the transaction in place, Google hasalso continued the path to diversify away from strictly online advertisingwhich accounts for 80% of its revenue. It’s no secret that Google is looking toexpand its services – and become an all-round solution for businesses. Some maycall it world domination.
Multi-clouddata analytics strategy
The deal also strengthens the movement ofbig players like Google consolidating analytics on top of their cloudenvironments. It also signals a move towards multi-cloud data analyticsstrategy and shows that the market has a larger role to play in the multi-cloudecosystem for analytics and BI players. As more and more analytics workloadmoves to the cloud, Google would have realised how data management, datapreparation and data governance can provide real value to its customers.
As Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian himselfput in a conference call with the press and analysts regarding Looker,
“We continue to support multiple clouds because we feel that’s what customers want. They also want to standardise on one toolset.”
Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO.
However, one thing that Google says it willnot shift is its strategy. The acquisition is to implement Looker’s approachfor crawling and integrating with data in multiple clouds. For that, Google isalready seeking support of Anthos that offers a hybrid model that is cloudagnostic.
By acquiring Looker, Google has jumped tothe third place in the cloud infrastructure market and will utilise Looker toundergo a digital transformation in data warehousing and BI.
What are your thoughts on the acquisition?let us know over on Twitter.
The Author, Matthew Nixon: @mattalytic
Molzana: @MOLZANAuk
