Google to acquire Looker

We’re very excited to announce that Google has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Looker, a unified platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics. The acquisition of Looker is expected to be complete later this year and is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals. Upon the close of the acquisition, Looker will join Google Cloud.

A fundamental requirement for organizations wanting to transform themselves digitally is the need to store, manage, and analyze large quantities of data from a variety of sources. Google Cloud offers customers a broad and integrated suite of cloud services to ingest data in real time, cleanse it, process it, aggregate it in a highly scalable data warehouse and analyze it. Many customers use Google Cloud, including Google BigQuery as their Enterprise Data Warehouse, for business analytics—using SQL to query real-time data streams; running fully managed Hadoop and Spark clusters; and using machine learning to automatically categorize and run forecasting and predictions on their data. A rapidly growing list of customers are also migrating their existing enterprise data warehouses from legacy technology stacks to our business analytics offering. These customers are choosing to do so because our offering is comprehensive, easy to use, cost effective and scales from a few gigabytes to multiple petabytes with excellent performance.

Looker extends our business analytics offering with two important capabilities—first, the ability to define business metrics once in a consistent way across data sources. This makes it easy for anyone to query data while maintaining consistent definitions in their calculations, ensuring teams get accurate results. Second, Looker also provides users with a powerful analytics platform that delivers applications for business intelligence and use-case specific solutions such as Sales Analytics, as well as a flexible, embedded analytics product to collaborate on business decisions. The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will help us offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualizing results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows. It will also help us deliver industry specific analytics solutions in our key verticals, whether that’s supply chain analytics in retailing; media analytics in entertainment; or healthcare analytics at global scale.

This acquisition builds on an existing partnership between our two companies where we share more than 350 joint customers, such as Buzzfeed, Hearst, King, Sunrun, WPP Essence, and Yahoo! who are already using our products together to unlock the value of their business data—from customer-centric marketing and support, to data-driven product development, and complex financial planning and budgeting.

"The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable us to further accelerate our leadership as a WordPress digital experience platform,” said Heather Brunner, Chairwoman and CEO, WP Engine. "By combining our BigQuery data warehouse with extended BI and visualization tools from Looker, we'll be empowered with faster, more actionable data insights that will help drive our business forward and better serve our customers."

Today’s announcement also continues our strategic commitment to multi-cloud. While we deepen the integration of Looker into Google Cloud Platform (GCP), customers will continue to benefit from Looker’s multi-cloud functionality and its ability to bring together data from SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk, as well as traditional data sources. This empowers companies to create a cohesive layer built on any cloud database, including Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or Teradata, as well as on other Public Clouds, and in on-premise data centers. Looker customers can rest assured that the high-quality support experience that Looker has provided will be bolstered by the resources, expertise, and global presence of our Cloud team. We will also continue to support best of breed analytics and visualization tools to provide customers the choice to use a variety of technologies with Google Cloud’s Analytics offering.

For any business that is looking for a partner to help drive digital transformation, the combination of Google Cloud and Looker will offer an incredible data management and analytics platform. We’re thrilled to bring more robust data management solutions to our customers and look forward to welcoming the Looker team to Google Cloud.