Google acquisition of Cloud Data analytics firm Looker Data Sciences has been put under scrutiny by Britain’s data watchdog as government authority wants to make sure that the $2.6 Billion purchase was transparent enough and would result in less competition in the UK market.
Sources from the Alphabet’s subsidiary stated that Looker’s acquisition was approved by the US and Austria government and UK regulators are behind an in-depth investigation.
In June 2019, the internet juggernaut stated that it was interested in buying Looker Data Sciences for a stipulated amount to help its customers visualize data in lines with Amazon’s Cloud Services. The idea was to complete the buyout by this year-end and merge the firm’s technology into Alphabet, rather than keeping the entity as a separate business.
Looker is a cloud data analytics firm that has a strong customer base of over 1700 clients including Amazon, IBM, Kickstarter, Sony, Spotify, and The Economist. The firm offers a cloud analytics database to Amazon’s Redshift n Anthena and Google’s BigQuery and Snowflake.
Looker CEO Frank Bien cleared the air that after the purchase, Looker’s customers will continue getting support to all cloud databases like Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and such.
As Looker allows customers to run their workloads on multi-cloud platforms, Google wants to integrate this technology onto its GCP to gain more cloud revenue.
But the latest probe by the UK’s data watchdog into Google-Looker deal might delay the deal closure on a further note- likely to end in March’20.
