Google gets green light for $2.6bn Looker acquisition

googleThe UK Competition & Markets Authority has kicked into touch concerns over Google’s stranglehold on the big data analytics market to wave through the tech giant’s $2.6bn acquisition of Looker Data Sciences, in a deal which was first revealed in June last year.

Looker was launched in January 2012 in California and competes against Microsoft’s Power BI, Domo Inc, and Tableau Software. The company makes use of a simple modelling language called LookML that lets data teams define the relationships in their database so business users can explore, save, and download data without needing to know SQL.

The deal follows Google’s acquisition of BigQuery, a management tool for large datasets.

The CMA said it was confident that the market is not likely to be confronted with adverse effects, like reduced competition, higher prices or the overall quality of service, on completion of the deal.

In a statement, the CMA said: “Although Google has the ability to make it difficult for rivals to access the Google generated data they need from online advertising and web analytics services, there was no strong evidence they would have the incentive to do this.”

In terms of revenue, Google’s cloud computing segment is a distant third globally behind top dog Amazon and second in line Microsoft.

Google CEO Thomas Kurian said: “We believe we will be uniquely positioned to address the data analytics and business intelligence demands of even more enterprises globally, across all industries.”

The CMA’s investigation into the Google Facebook digital advertising duopoly continues.

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