Google cloud dives deeper into the data dreamland

Google’s cloud business unit has announced the acquisition of data analytics firm Looker for $2.6 billion, further expanding products available in the ever-growing world of cloud.

While another acquisition at Google is nothing out of the ordinary, this happens to be the first under the tenure of Thomas Kurian, the newest CEO of the cloud business. Kurian took the reigns from Diane Greene at the beginning of this year, after Greene failed to deliver on the hype which surrounded her appointment.

“A fundamental requirement for organizations wanting to transform themselves digitally is the need to store, manage, and analyse large quantities of data from a variety of sources,” said Kurian in a blog announcement. “Google Cloud offers customers a broad and integrated suite of cloud services to ingest data in real time, cleanse it, process it, aggregate it in a highly scalable data warehouse and analyse it.

“Looker extends our business analytics offering with two important capabilities—first, the ability to define business metrics once in a consistent way across data sources. This makes it easy for anyone to query data while maintaining consistent definitions in their calculations, ensuring teams get accurate results.

“Second, Looker also provides users with a powerful analytics platform that delivers applications for business intelligence and use-case specific solutions such as Sales Analytics, as well as a flexible, embedded analytics product to collaborate on business decisions.”

With Looker being integrated into the Google proposition, the cloud team will have something more interesting to talk about. Kurian has discussed a more complete analytics solution, including visualisation of results and integration into daily workflows, as well as the ability to make more customisable solutions for the verticals.

Another interesting benefit of this acquisition is building Google’s ability to work in a multi-cloud landscape. Although any cloud company will want to pigeon hole enterprises into their own products, bleeding customers is of course more profitable, it is not realistic in today’s world. If you do not have a proposition which is interoperable with other cloud providers, you are not going to be attractive to customers.

There are numerous examples of this being an important factor of the cloud world of tomorrow. The Data Transfer Project is an initiative to build a common framework with open-source code that can connect any two online service providers, while Vodafone Business and IBM came together to create a joint-venture aiming to solve the problem presented by multi-cloud interoperability.

As part this acquisition, Google is also inheriting the ability to play in this world, bumping its ability to bring together data from SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk, as well as traditional data sources.

Google Cloud has seemingly been losing out to the likes of Microsoft Azure and AWS in recent years, a factor which reportedly contributed to Greene’s downfall. This is not to say the cloud business is not successful, but it is not tearing up trees at the same rate as the two market leaders.

Perhaps this is only one of the first announcements we should expect from Kurian over the next couple of months. This is a man who needs to make his mark on the business, but also close the gap Microsoft and Amazon have created at the top of the cloud rankings.