One CEO’s Perspective On Google’s Acquisition of Looker

Google announced the acquisition of Looker yesterday for roughly $2.6BN. That is an incredible outcome for the Looker team and a savvy move for Google Cloud Platform. I want to congratulate both organizations and wish them and their customers success on their journey. This move, in addition to Google’s recent acquisitions of Cask Data, Alooma and Velostrata, focuses on helping organizations analyze big data and migrate data, apps and other IT functions to cloud environments (respectively).

What Makes Looker Attractive to Google

Looker’s product is a full-stack offering with powerful API capabilities via their proprietary LookML language (simple, composable SQL-like language for engineers to develop data analyses). Largely focused on the mid market and SMB, Looker provides Google with a full stack solution from database through visualization. The acquisition of Looker aligns with Google’s developer-oriented product family and is a step toward an offering that is more competitive with AWS and Azure. Additionally, the core focus of their recent acquisitions has been IT-oriented, with data engineering a key component.

These recent acquisitions enable more of an SMB aligned strategy rather than Fortune 2000 enterprises.

This Spells More Disruption in the Marketplace

The acquisition of Looker will create additional competitive pressure on tools like Tableau, Google’s own Data Studio, PowerBI and Qlik, along with uncertainty around Looker’s continued support of data platforms outside of Google Cloud. Additionally, with a lack of virtualization/federation, autonomous data engineering, multi-pass/multi-dimensional support, or a means to support heterogeneous, multi-platform environments within existing enterprises, the scale, performance and agility required by Fortune 2000 organizations will likely be out of reach for quite some time.

The Enterprise Data Cloud Market Still Needs Addressing

That said, the move makes sense as it gets Google closer to the enterprise and given their ambitions, this is great news for AtScale as all roads to large enterprise data clouds are enabled by AtScale!