Google continues to preach the multi-cloud approach with the acquisition of Looker – TechCrunch



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When Google announced its intention to buy $ 2.6 billion from Looker yesterday morning, you can not blame some of the company's 1,600 customers if they worry a little if Looker Thomas Kurian, head of Google Cloud, said the company would continue to support an open approach to its latest purchase when it will join the group later this year.

This corresponds to messages from Google Next, the company's cloud conference in April. He sought to present himself as a more open cloud. This was going to be more user-friendly for open source projects, running them directly on Google Cloud. This would provide a way to manage your workloads wherever they live with Anthos.

Ray Wang, founder and principal badyst at Constellation Research, said that in a multi-cloud world, Looker represented one of the best choices, which could explain why Google chose it. "Looker's strengths are its centralized data modeling and governance, which promotes consistency and reuse. It runs on modern cloud databases, including Google's BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake, "Wang told TechCrunch. He added, "They wanted to acquire a tool as easy to use as Microsoft Power BI and as deep as Tableau."

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal badyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, also sees this deal as part of Google's consistent multi-cloud message. "I think this is consistent with the latest strategy described by Google Next. He spoke of sophisticated badytical tools that can extract data from disparate sources, "he said.

Kurian pushing the multi-cloud message

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, The successor to Diane Greene at the end of last year made a point of emphasizing the company's commitment to providing multi-cloud and multi-database support in its comments to the media and badysts. "We first want to point out that we are very committed to maintaining local support for other clouds, as well as to managing data from multiple databases, as customers want to have an badytical base. unique for their organization and to be able to access it in the badytical framework. base, look at data from multiple data sources. So we are very attached to that, "Kurian said yesterday.

From a broader customer perspective, Kurian believes that Looker offers customers a unique way to access and view data. "One of the challenges companies face in implementing business intelligence, which we believe has gone very well, is providing you with a single place to model your data, define your data definitions. such as revenue, which or the number of open server tickets – and then allows you to merge data into individual data silos, so that as an organization, you work from a set of consistent metrics, "Kurian explained.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Looker's general manager, Frank Bien, sought to dispel fears that the company could move away from multi-cloud and multi-database support. "For customers and partners, it's important to know that today's announcement reinforces our commitment and Google Cloud's commitment to multi-cloud. Looker customers can expect that all cloud databases, such as Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, etc., will continue to be supported, "writes Well in this article .

No antitrust concerns

Kurian also pointed out that this deal should not attract the attention of antitrust regulators, who have been sniffing for some time at big tech companies like Google / Alphabet, Apple and Amazon. "We do not buy any data in this transaction. This does not introduce any concentration risk in terms of data concentration. Second, there are a large number of badysis tools on the market. By simply buying Looker, we are no longer concentrating the market. Finally, all other cloud players also have their own badytics tools. This represents a further reinforcement of our competitive position compared to other market players, "he explained. Not to mention his commitment to maintaining multi-cloud and multi-database support, which should show that he is not doing it solely for the benefit of Google or specifically attracting customers to GCP.

This week, the company announced a partnership with Snowflake, the startup of a cloud-based data warehouse that raised nearly $ 1 billion on a Google Cloud platform. It is already running AWS and Microsoft Azure. In fact, Wang hinted that Snowflake could be Google's next target in developing its multi-cloud badytics offering.

Whatever it is, with Looker, the company has a data badysis tool that complements its data processing tools. Together, the two companies should provide a relatively complete data solution. If they really keep it multi-cloud, this should satisfy current customers, especially those who work with tools outside of the Google Cloud ecosystem or just want to retain their flexibility.

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