Google has announced to take over business intelligence platform Looker for 2.6 billion U.S. dollars (2.3 billion euros). Looker’s services must be added to the Internet giant’s Cloud platform. The acquisition is intended to close the gap with the solutions of competitors AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Looker closes the gap in two areas of data warehousing and business intelligence. It provides a layer for exploring and transforming data and it provides the dashboards that are the last mile to the end user. Although Looker facilitates both areas, it does not necessarily replace ETL tools such as Informatics or visualization tools such as Tableau. Instead, it should address the challenge of providing access to a single source of truth.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian pointed out several points that are part of the deal during a conversation with ZDNet. Both companies will support multiple clouds and data sources. “We continue to support multiple clouds because we think that’s what customers want. They also want to standardize on one toolset,” says Kurian.
In addition, Looker supports the pillars of the Google Cloud because it supports digital transformation and industry-focused efforts. In addition, the two companies fit well together in terms of culture, says Kurian.
Platform
Looker’s platform, which is cloud-based, contains two components. First of all, it is a modeling platform where the user programs the display of the data using an SQL-like proprietary modeling language, namely LookML. The platform crawls the databases to generate a baseline model, which developers then enrich.
Compared to traditional modeling tools, LookML goes beyond programming the underlying schema of the resource by enriching it with metadata about how entities are related, how tables are merged, data is collected, derived values are calculated, and more. It can model relational and non-relational data as JSON documents.
The platform complements the modeling language with an end-user visualization tool that provides the self-service analytics part.
Takeover
Google doesn’t want to change one thing, and that’s Looker’s support for crawling and integrating with data in multiple clouds. Therefore, it is very consistent with Google’s strategy for its Anthos solution, which is designed to provide a Kubernetes-based hybrid environment that is cloud-agnostic.
Both companies already know each other well. The two share 350 customers. Google expects to complete the acquisition later this year.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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