Dive Brief:
- Google announced its intent to acquire enterprise data pipeline company Alooma on Tuesday in a bid to ease customers' migrations to Google Cloud Platform.
- Alooma helps customers move information from different sources, such as on-premise, cloud or multicloud environments, into a single data warehouse. By simplifying the path to a single database, customers make use of Google services such as analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and security, according to the announcement.
- The company did not disclose the purchase price. The six-year-old startup had raised $15 million, including $11.2 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2016. In addition to cloud and data migration assistance, Alooma offers companies a variety of solutions for data pipelines and management.
Dive Insight:
It will be "business as usual" as the companies wait for regulatory approval to complete the deal, according to a statement from a Google spokesperson. Existing customers of Alooma will be able to have access and support for other cloud providers, but Google "will only be accepting new customers that are migrating data to Google Cloud Platform."
Cloud providers have been gobbling up cloud-related startups in recent years, with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud leading with more than 20 acquisitions a piece in the last five years.
Amazon Web Services has made far fewer acquisitions, though the company recently acquired TSO Logic and CloudEndure in an unusual flurry of activity for the leader of the cloud infrastructure market.
The CloudEndure acquisition was a strategic play for Amazon's migration capabilities, helping customers lift and shift workloads from on-prem to cloud. TSO Logic helps organizations optimize cloud migration, providing a tool to make a business case for migration.
Google Cloud is still a younger player in the enterprise computing space, and it has an uphill battle against Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, according to Chris Gardner, Forrester senior analyst, in an interview with CIO Dive in October. The company is neck-and-neck with IBM for market share, another company making big plays in the hybrid and multicloud space.
To compete more aggressively in the cloud market, Google is investing fourfold in an expanded sales force under the watch of CEO Thomas Kurian, who recently took over the unit from Diane Greene. Kurian wants a larger staff to better respond to businesses experiencing issues with Google Cloud's product.
