How do you up your game in the competitive world of Data and Analytics? Well, one way is through acquisition.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google recently acquired Looker, a Santa\nCruz-based data analytics startup, for a whopping $2.6 billion. The all-cash\ndeal was the fourth-biggest in Google\u2019s history and this has helped Google\nCloud close the gap in the cloud space market against Amazon (Amazon Web\nServices) and Microsoft (Azure).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looker was set up in 2012 and uses big data\nto assist companies to retain consumers and understand their behavior. With\nLooker\u2019s assistance, video game developers like King, the makers of Candy\nCrush, have been able to retain their players and media outlets like The\nEconomist can better strategize their subscriber model. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Looker?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Looker\u2019s cloud-based platform has two\ncomponents \u2013 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. A powerful modeling platform that helps the developers by crawling target databases to generate baseline data models. That happens through an SQL-like modeling language which the user uses to \u2018codify\u2019 the data. <\/li>
2. End-user visualisation tool provides self-service analytics \u2013 allowing for quick analysis of data by analysts, marketers and business owners. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

   But what could have led Google to buy\nLooker and what can come out of this deal? We look at three possibilities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   An Upgrade<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

   The acquisition will likely see a significant upgrade to Google\u2019s data management ecosystem. Looker would make it easy for Google Cloud to build a data exploration platform at enterprise level, building on their Google Data Studio<\/a> offering. In the same way that Tableau<\/a> and Microsoft Power BI<\/a> do, Looker could quickly make data accessible for the entire organization as a bolt on for Google Cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   What do I mean by that? Simply put: a tool\nfor business users and to find insights in their otherwise unwieldy datasets.\nLooker will allow users to quickly access petabytes of data through Google\nCloud Service\u2019s products, such as BigQuery. One of the true powers of this type\nof integration is going to be in accessing Machine Learning Capabilities (Big\nQuery Machine Learning), that allows creating and deploying machine learning\nmodels simple. Looker will most likely increase the pace of model development\nand allow business users to get to learning much faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n