What a $ 20 billion week signals for data and analytics
When $ 20 billion is spent buying two companies in the same market segment within a few days, you don't have to be James Holzhauser to see that a basic market shift is over us.
This we saw this week with Google's $ 2.6 billion Looker acquisition, followed by Salesforce's $ 15.7 billion acquisition of Tableau. Not only are these objectively large purchases, but they are the biggest for both Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce. In fact, the Looker acquisition is the third largest acquisition ever for the Google parent company alphabet.
So what do these historic acquisitions mean?
After spending a few days digesting the news and chatting with partners, analysts and friends in the industry, here's what I think this week tells us about both the cloud and analytics markets.
The gravity of data is now in the cloud
The concept of data gravity is nothing new. It was originally introduced by Dave McCrory back in 201[ads1]0. McCrory points that when data is accumulated, it becomes harder and harder to move. Therefore, the environments that build up most data will naturally attract services and applications that use the underlying information.
Data has shifted to the cloud in recent years, either in the form of cloud applications such as Salesforce.com or cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. However, the pace of this shift over the past 12 months has gone into exaggeration. The cost, scale and operational efficiency of the cloud is to drive businesses to invest in it. With more data moving to the cloud, more analyzes, transformations, and data quality workloads are also moved there. So Google's and Salesforce's ability to better visualize the rapidly growing amount of data on the platforms makes Looker and Tableau extremely valuable resources.
User Experience Is Important For Adoption And Growth In Business
Despite all the mess on how computer science role is the sexiest job of the 21st century, the majority of individuals in organizations working on data are not computer scientists and do not know how to code. The value of data is not reduced depending on your skill set with SQL or Python, so why restrict access to people who are skilled in these tools? Providing an intuitive user experience is the key to expanding the use of data and the platforms the data lies on a much larger set of users.
Looker and Tableau have been successful because of their ability to open up business intelligence to non-IT users who previously never had the proper interface to work with data effectively. Users of these platforms come from different business areas. As long as the data is clean and well-structured, anyone in an organization can quickly pick up Looker or Tableau, access data, and find the answers they need. By integrating these capabilities into the platforms, Google and Salesforce can provide a wider range of users with the ability to visualize different data across different applications.
Cloud native is a requirement of the modern data bank
The word "cloud" can have a Million different meanings depending on who you are talking to and the context of the conversation. A technology provider claiming support for "cloud distribution" can range from supporting a traditional application / server architecture in the cloud to supporting native cloud computing, security, access control, resilient scale, etc. When cloud progress continues, organizations will quickly find that In order to fully modernize their operations to capture the benefits of the cloud, they will need native integration with shooting services. This applies not only to business intelligence, but also to the entire modern computer stack, including data preparation, quality, cataloging, machine learning and computer science.
Founders founders shifted this to the cloud at the beginning and integrated with scalable cloud analytics platforms such as Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Azure SQL DW. Founded in 2003, Tableaus became the first success road to the traditional desktop / server architecture, but the company has managed to navigate this shift to the cloud incredibly well. By bringing Amazon Web Services veteran Adam Selipsky to CEO in 2016, Tableau quickly accepted the cloud focus through rapid shift in product architecture and market focus. Native cloud support ensures that Looker and Tableau can quickly adopt the continued innovation that takes place in the cloud and increase the consumption of the various shooting services. Google and Salesforce give you an intuitive analytics team.
Do you have anything else to take on this news? If so, send me a tweet on @a_adam_wilson with what you think this week means for cloud and data management markets.
Adam Wilson is CEO of Trifacta.
