Why has Google bought Looker?

Google recently acquired Looker, a Santa Cruz-based data analytics startup, for a whopping $2.6 billion.

How do you up your game in the competitive world of Data and Analytics? Well, one way is through acquisition.

Google recently acquired Looker, a Santa Cruz-based data analytics startup, for a whopping $2.6 billion. The all-cash deal was the fourth-biggest in Google's history and this has helped Google Cloud close the gap in the cloud space market against Amazon (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft (Azure).

Looker was set up in 2012 and uses big data to assist companies to retain consumers and understand their behavior. The acquisition will likely see a significant upgrade to Google's data management ecosystem. Looker would make it easy for Google Cloud to build a data exploration platform at enterprise level.

With the transaction in place, Google has also continued the path to diversify away from strictly online advertising which accounts for 80% of its revenue.

By acquiring Looker, Google has jumped to the third place in the cloud infrastructure market and will utilise Looker to undergo a digital transformation in data warehousing and BI.