Investing.com - Google looks set to prop up its armory in the battle for cloud dominance with the $2.6 billion purchase of data-analytics company Looker.
Looker will be integrated into Google Cloud after the deal closes later this year and will play a key role in the tech giant's efforts to analyze data across the cloud, according to Google. Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) fell 0.60% in afternoon trading.
The deal will build on a partnership that the two companies currently share with more than 350 joint customers, including Buzzfeed, Hearst, Sunrun, WPP (LON:WPP) and Yahoo.
At its core, Lookers' secret sauce essentially cuts down the heavy lifting involved in analyzing large datasets. This may boost Google's cloud offering, as its clients will be better equipped to take advantage of the various analytics available on the tech giant's platform.
Alphabet doesn't yet disclose revenue that Google's cloud business. In December, ZD Net estimated it at roughly $4 billion a year, well behind the cloud businesses of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN). The latter's Amazon Web Services reported $7.7 billion in revenue in the first quarter alone. Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment generated $9.7 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter.
In a world where every byte counts and the speed by which data is turned into action can be the difference between a dollar gained or lost, Looker's ability to parse data, unsurprisingly, has not gone unnoticed.
"The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
Looker counts some well-known clients among its ranks, including Amazon.com, Etsy (NASDAQ:ETSY), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Sony (NYSE:SNE) and Spotify (NYSE:SPOT), among others.