Google's proposed acquisition of Looker invites probe from UK's competition watchdog

The CMA is inviting comments from interested parties on the merger by 20th December

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced yesterday that it has started an investigation into Google's proposed acquisition of Looker Data Sciences.

The competition watchdog said it was examining whether Google's takeover of the cloud data analytics firm would have any adverse impact on the cloud computing market in the UK.

'The Competition and Markets Authority is considering whether it is or may be the case that this transaction, if carried into effect, will result in the creation of a relevant merger situation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002 and, if so, whether the creation of that situation may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services,' the CMA stated.

Under the Enterprise Act, executives found guilty of creating cartels could face up to five years in prison.

The CMA is currently inviting comments from all interested parties on the merger by 20th December.

The Phase One investigation will help the competition watchdog decide whether it needs to start a full Phase Two probe. If the CMA launches a detailed Phase Two probe in the coming days and finds evidence of negative impact on the market, it could impose requirements on both firms in order to get approval for the deal.

Earlier in June, Google said that it was planning to acquire Looker for £2bn ($2.6bn) in an effort to expand its cloud offerings.

Google wants to add Looker to its Cloud division, which ranks third in the cloud infrastructure market after Amazon and Microsoft.

Google currently offers the BigQuery visualisation tool to help clients find patterns in data. Its users include Yahoo and Buzzfeed, among others, and it is powerful enough to compete alongside the likes of Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.

"The addition of Looker to Google Cloud will help us offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualising results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows," Google's cloud chief Thomas Kurian said in June when the company announced the deal.

Looker's takeover will be the first major deal forKurian, who replaced Diane Greene as the head of the cloud division last year.

Looker is a privately held big data analytics firm headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. The company allows users to analyse and visualise all the data they hold in different cloud services, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, in one place. Last year, a funding round valued the company at $1.6 billion.

In June, Looker's CEO Frank Bien said that the company serves more than 1,600 customers and that its revenue was growing 70 per cent year-over-year.

"The combination of Google Cloud's BigQuery and associated data infrastructure and Looker's platform for innovative data solutions will reinvent what it means to solve business problems with data at an entirely different scale and value point," Bien said.

Bien is likely to stay with Google and report to Kurian after completion of Looker's purchase.