Google buys $ 2.6 billion from the cloud computing company Looker

Google is preparing to acquire the data badytics company Looker as part of the first major acquisition of its new cloud leader in his tenure. Google has announced that it would buy Looker for $ 2.6 billion in cash.

Former Oracle CEO Thomas Kurian joined Google Cloud as the new CEO in November, replacing former CEO Diane Greene. Kurian said at a conference in February that he was considering investing and developing his business significantly, stating, "You will see us accelerate growth even faster than we have up to now ".

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has already invested in Looker through its venture capital fund, Capital G. It will be Google's largest acquisition since the acquisition of Nest's smart home company, another Alphabet-funded company, for $ 3.2 billion in 2014.

Google is trying to gain market share from the industry leader, Amazon Web Services, which generated $ 7.7 billion in revenue in the last quarter. Google does not disclose revenue for its cloud business, but said it would bring in more than $ 1 billion per quarter between its public cloud and its cloud apps. According to a report by Cbadys, Google held 7.6% of the cloud market at the end of 2018, against 13.7% for Microsoft and 32% for Amazon.

The purchase of Looker will add a new badytics tool for Google Cloud customers. Google said the technology would help customers badyze their data consistently across multiple sources and provide industry-specific badytics. Google said in its press release that it has already shared more than 350 customers under an existing partnership, including BuzzFeed, Yahoo and Hearst.

The decision support tool of Looker works on several clouds in addition to that of Google and integrates with other databases competing with its own products. During a teleconference with reporters Thursday, Kurian said that Looker would continue to work with these other products, such as Redshift from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure SQL Server. Domo and Tableau are the competitors of Looker, as well as Microsoft Power BI and AWS QuickSight.

This acquisition follows Google's announcement of its Anthos product, which allows companies to run IT workloads across multiple clouds.

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Look: Google buys a Looker Data Analysis platform under a $ 2.6 billion contract