On February 13, Google closed its $2.6 billion cash acquisition of data-analytics company Looker, which it announced in June 2019. Coresight Research Take The Looker acquisition adds business intelligence and data-visualization capabilities to Google Cloud, which, combined with other recent acquisitions, enhances its capabilities in competition with AWS and Microsoft. The acquisition underscores the importance of business intelligence and data visualization for enterprises and retailers and its timing parallels Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau, also announced in June 2019. About Looker Looker offers a unified platform for business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics, which enables data analysts to obtain business intelligence and visualize data without the need for programming. Looker will join Google Cloud. Google mentioned that the two companies share 350 common customers, including Buzzfeed, Hearst, King, Sunrun, WPP Essence and Yahoo!. Looker has $131.6 million in annual revenues, according to Owler, and its competitors include Domo Software, Microsoft Tableau (acquired by Salesforce) and Microsoft Power BI. Google Cloud: We’re #3, We Try Harder In its 4Q19 earnings report, Google disclosed the size of its cloud business for the first time, announcing the segment’s revenues amounted to nearly $9 billion in 2019 and that it grew at a 48% CAGR during 2017–2019. [caption id="attachment_103688" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Source: Company reports [/caption]   The figure below provides cloud revenues for selected providers, in which Amazon is the dominant leader: Microsoft and Google are neck and neck for the #2 and #3 spots. [caption id="attachment_103689" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Source: Company reports [/caption]   Google Putting its Cash to Work in Acquisitions The table below shows recent Google acquisitions, of which three have been made by Google Cloud (excluding Fitbit). Two of the acquisitions exceed $2 billion in value. [caption id="attachment_103692" align="aligncenter" width="700"] *Announced date
Source: Company reports[/caption]