SANTA CRUZ — Google Cloud announced Wednesday that it has completed its $2.6 billion acquisition of Santa Cruz data analytics company Looker.
Google LLC, owned by holding company Alphabet Inc., first announced in June 2019 it had entered into an agreement to acquire Looker. Looker was founded in 2012 and has more than 900 employees. The company has offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boulder, Colorado; London, Dublin and Tokyo. Google Cloud is a cloud platform that uses Google’s private network and modernizes enterprise customers’ computing environment. The companies formed a partnership four years ago.
“Joining Google Cloud provides us better reach, strengthens our resources, and brings together some of the best minds in both analytics and cloud infrastructure to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners,” said Frank Bien, CEO of Looker in the company’s blog Wednesday. “The mission that we undertook seven years ago as Looker takes a significant step forward beginning today.”
In the blog, Bien said Looker customers will still be able to choose from multiple cloud data management systems, including Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle and others. He said Looker partners can expect to work with the company as they did before the acquisition, and that customer support will be bolstered by the Google Cloud team. Bien thanked customers and partners for their support and said he plans to make more announcements about business plans in the future.
“And by joining together, we believe we will be uniquely positioned to address the data analytics and business intelligence demands of even more enterprises globally, across all industries,” Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud wrote in a company blog post Wednesday. “Looker will strengthen Google Cloud’s analytics and data warehouse capabilities, including BigQuery, enabling our customers to address some of their toughest business challenges, faster—all while maintaining complete control of their data. We’re thrilled to officially welcome the Looker team to Google Cloud.”
Some companies have expressed their support of the acquisition.
“The combination of Google Cloud and Looker and their commitment to multi-cloud support will help deliver more value to customers faster,” said Frank Slootman, CEO of cloud-based data company Snowflake in the Google blog. “We look forward to our continued partnership with both companies.”
