Looker will join Google Cloud. Its chief executive, Thomas Kurian, is behind this purchase – his first since joining the company in November 2018 – and Alphabet’s biggest since it bought Nest in 2014.

Kurian said: “The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation. We remain committed to our multi-cloud strategy and will retain and expand Looker’s capabilities to analyse data across Clouds.”

Looker was founded in 2012, employs about 800 people and has raised $281m in venture capital. It shares more than 350 customers including Buzzfeed, Hearst, King and WPP Essence. Its chief executive, Frank Bien, is expected to stay at Google.

Bien added: “We’ll have greater reach, more resources, and the brightest minds in both analytics and cloud infrastructure working together to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners. Together, we are reinventing what it means to solve business problems with data at an entirely different scale and value point.”

Amazon and Microsoft lead the cloud market – accounting for 32% and 13.7% respectively – with Google in third place at 7.6%, according to Canalys.

IDC put the worldwide revenue of big data and business analytics at £166bn in 2017 – up 11.7%.