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13/02/2020

Google Completes $2.6 billion Acquisition Of Britain’s Looker




Google Completes $2.6 billion Acquisition Of Britain’s Looker
Acquisition of the British privately held big-data analytics firm Looker Data Sciences has been completed by Alphabet Inc-owned Google. The deal worth $2.6 billion was completed after the companies got clearance from the United Kingdom’s competition watchdog, Google said on Thursday.
 
This all cash deal was announced by Google in June last year which was also the first major acquisition by the company since the new chief executive officer of Google’s new cloud business Thomas Kurian had taken over the business. Google hopes to further augment the capacities of the already successful Google Cloud's BigQuery which is a tool for management of large sets of data.
 
According to Google, the tool of Looker in management of large datasets allows its users – including analysts and other staff members of the company, to identify and define calculations for items such as revenue or high-value customers and then present the trends derived from the data in the form of visualizations without the requirement for it to be presented through large and complicated scripts for description. Tableau Software Inc, Domo Inc and Microsoft's Power BI are the rivals of the tool.
 
The deal will not have any adverse impact on the competition in the market for data analytics tools and software and will not affect the quality of the services provided, said the Competition and Markets Authority while announcing the results of its investigations.

It was unlikely that the acquisition would result in any form of increase in prices or in the lowering of quality because of the fact that the two companies cannot be looked at as being close competitors in the business or by clients who make use business intelligence tools  because there are many more options available in the market for the clients for such tool and software such as those from Microsoft, Oracle, Tableau, SAP and IBM, the CMA added.
 
In the global industry of cloud computing, the current market leaders are Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp with leverage over more than 70 per cent of the global market as well as in terms of revenues generated while Google's cloud computing business is a distant third globally.
 
"Although Google had the ability to make it difficult for rivals to access the Google-generated data they need from online advertising and web analytics services, there was no strong evidence they would have the incentive to do this," the CMA found.
 
The Department of Justice of the United States and the Austrian Federal Competition Authority has also approved the deal.
 
"We believe we will be uniquely positioned to address the data analytics and business intelligence demands of even more enterprises globally, across all industries," said Kurian in a statement announcing the completion of the acquisition.
 
(Source:www.nasdaq.com)

Christopher J. Mitchell

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