Google Acquires Looker, Salesforce Acquires Tableau

The IT industry has been buzzing with acquisitions and mergers this year. Two of the biggest mergers came just a few days ago. The developments we are referring to are Google’s acquisition of Looker, a data analytics firm, and Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau.

But what is Looker and what makes Google interested in it?

Looker is a 7-year-old analytics firm that has made a huge impact on the IT market. Over its lifetime, the startup has been able to acquire an astounding 1600 customers and cross the milestone of $100 million in revenue. This is a huge feat for any company. To top it all off, Looker’s CEO Frank Bien is extremely ambitious about disrupting the BI and analytics domains in the IT industry looking at the 70 per cent year-on-year growth of the firm. The company aims to provide an end-to-end solution to reconstitute a single view of information on one platform.

Additionally, Looker has been an investor magnet. This hot analytics startup has raised over $280 million in investment from major players like Premji Invest. The company has over 600 employees and CEO Bien has indicated that they will be adding 200 more employees to their ranks in the next few months following the cash inflow.

Coming to why Google has picked up Looker for a whopping $2.6 billion to add to its sea of acquisitions, the two firms have had a long-standing partnership with around 350 common clients. Google will be adding Looker to its suite of tools on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) which makes perfect sense as the brand hopes to make its cloud platform a one-stop solution for its clients. The addition of Looker to this suite adds a new layer to GCP: Smart Analytics as a Service. This will bring about fully managed, serverless, enterprise-class, globally distributed analytics to the already strong Google Cloud.

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So, what does this mean for techies?

The acquisition of Looker is a huge win for IT professionals. Techies working in domains like development, testing, deployment, DevOps, project and product management, data analytics, data science, and cloud architecture will be able to feel the direct impact of this acquisition if their company uses GCP. The new smart analytics layer that Looker adds to the cloud platform will provide an integrated solution to almost all projects. All the perks of business intelligence – data integration, data analytics, and data reporting will be available right on Google Cloud without the need to add on any extra plugins or using an additional tool for them. Bien commented about the acquisition,

Why does Salesforce want to add Tableau to its ranks?

Almost every single techie has heard of both Salesforce and Tableau even if they don’t understand what these two brands offer. To give you some context, Salesforce is a cloud-based solutions provider that specializes in cloud architecture and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The brand is a market leader in the CRM space and boasts clients like KFC, Godrej, HCL etc.

Tableau, on the other hand, is a business intelligence solution company that specializes in data visualization. The company offers one of the most popular BI tools in the market that is used by almost every single leading brand for data reporting.

Putting two and two together, the $15.7 billion worth acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce makes absolute sense. Similar to why Google acquired Looker, Salesforce hopes to provide an end-to-end solution for its clients that can allow them to analyze data and make smarter decisions. Giants in the space of cloud computing have offered similar solutions for a long time and with Google joined this pack by picking up Looker earlier this month.

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The takeaway here is that the IT industry is moving towards integrated tools that provide one-stop solutions to their clients without the need to use an extra set of hands for all their projects. This not only makes it easier and cost-effective for companies to look for solution partners, but it also makes the work of their employees simpler as they don’t need to learn different workflows for everything they do. These developments will also boost the usage of both GCP and Salesforce as both these cloud platforms are becoming integrated solutions. This adds to the reasons you should learn these trending technologies today. If you want to become a professional skilled in Salesforce then, check out our Salesforce Developer1 Certification which comes with instructor-led live training and real life project experience.

Also, for people who already know these tools, the acquisitions open up another ocean of opportunities as the parent companies will acquire all the clients of the acquisitions. So, you might be able to use these skills on an integrated platform adding another dimension to your job description.