Google announced a deal to buy business analytics software vendor Looker for $2.6 billion. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Google’s existing cloud database products by letting users create shared business metrics and develop applications. Looker will continue to run on all cloud database platforms.

Nothing is murkier than influencer marketing. Klear, an influencer marketing platform, says it can fix this with a newly-announced feature to estimate campaign ROI by calculating Earned Media Value – that is, the how much it would cost to buy the same amount of coverage in paid media (a.k.a. advertising). Not everyone agrees that EMV is a valid approach.

IT teams spend lots of time on repetitive requests from business users, finds this TeamDynamix survey.  You might think the implication is IT should let users do more for themselves.  But the main time-wasters are things like password resets, employee on-boarding, and managing credentials, which can’t really be delegated.  And here’s the kicker: IT professionals automate those tasks by building sloppy, insecure, undocumented scripts, just like the non-professionals.   Fun fact: 53% of teams manage 100 or more applications.