Alphabet has announced Google LLC will acquire Looker for $2.6 billion in an all-cash transaction. Looker is a young business intelligence (BI) company and will join the Google Cloud product line. This is not a surprise. It is a needed addition to the portfolio.

Google and Amazon have led the way to the cloud because that was core to their internal business practices. While IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Tableau, and others were slower to move to the cloud, they better understood how to communicate to the business market. That ability to focus on business needs has let them make strong inroads into the cloud. One of the key item all the companies had to offer was a suite of BI tools.

Source: forbes.com
Author: David A. Teich