The purchase furthers Google’s interest in cloud computing., which also reflects growing business demand for such services. As Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, points out: “organizations wanting to transform themselves digitally is the need to store, manage, and analyze large quantities of data from a variety of sources”.
Kurian goes on to explain, in a blog post, how Google Cloud provides an integrated suite of cloud services that can collect data in real time, review it, process it, and aggregate it in a scalable data warehouse and provide meaningful analytics. What Looker’s technology provides is the “ability to define business metrics once in a consistent way across data sources”, plus the capability to use Looker’s analytics platform, which is designed to provide a range of applications for business intelligence. The analytics platform provides features like embedded analytics and data visualizations.
As part of the deal, Looker will continue to support the other cloud databases it works with, such as like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Teradata.
The acquisition reflects how the cloud computing and data analytics markets are growing rapidly, reflecting how companies are seeking to leverage all of their data to make more informed decisions. With the rapid migration of big data workloads from on-premises servers to cloud platforms, this also provides opportunities for the captured customer data to be used for big data projects. For this reason cloud providers like Google can also sell a wider array of add-on services, and Looker purchase provides such a service that Google hopes will be widely adopted.
