(Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it would buy Looker, a big-data analytics company, for $2.6 billion in cash, in the first major acquisition for new Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian. The deal builds on an existing partnership where the two companies share more than 350 customers, including BuzzFeed, Hearst and Yahoo , Google said in a statement. Looker provides a visualization tool that helps customers spot trends and draw other lessons from their data. It competes with tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Corp’s Power BI.