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Google digs deep behind back of multicoloured chaise longue, finds a spare $2.6bn to slurp analytics house Looker

First buy under new broom Thomas Kurian as Chocolate Factory tries to make up ground on AWS and Microsoft

Google is spending a whopping $2.6bn on data analytics and machine learning specialist Looker.

The all-cash buy aims to boost Google’s analytics chops for enterprise customers. Looker claims to offer access to complex business analytics without requiring an army of white coated data scientists.

Looker will be housed in Google's Cloud unit. Head of that division, the recently appointed Thomas Kurian - brother of NetApp CEP George - told media today:

"The combination provides an end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze and visualize data across Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, on-premises databases and ISV applications."

Founded in 2011, San Francisco-based Looker has so far amassed $280.5m in funding, according to Crunchbase.

The portfolio includes web and sales analytics and digital marketing analysis by simplifying the creation of dashboards, report building and developing models.

Looker CEO Frank Bien said the buy obviously gives it longer wider reach and a deeper resource pool to dip into, both in terms of people skills and finances.

He said that when the business launched: “What we wanted to do was disrupt this pretty staid ecosystem of data visualization tools and and data prep tools that companies were being forced to build solutions. We thought it was time to rationalize a new platform for data, a single place where we could really reconstitute a single view of information and make it available in the enterprise for business purposes."

The two firms already work together and claim 350 shared customers.

Google will hope the buy will help it compete against Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services which both enjoy a far bigger share of the cloud market. AWS, for example, grew by $2.3bn in 2018 - Google grew to $2.3bn.

The seven year old company has 600 staff in eight locations including Dublin and London. It was founded by Lloyd Tabb, previously a principal engineer at Netscape. He also helped set up mozilla.org. ®

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