Google Buys Another Cloud Migration Startup

Last May, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google bought Israel-based Velostrata as part of its efforts to make enterprise cloud migration easier. The search giant announced today that it is now acquiring another cloud migration company: Alooma. Google says it is "looking forward to adding to our growing Google Cloud footprint in Israel," with the Alooma team joining Velostrata. Alooma has offices in California and Israel.

This is the first acquisition since Thomas Kurian took over as Google Cloud CEO this year.

What Alooma does

Alooma helps companies migrate their databases to the cloud using a data pipeline that can collect data from multiple sources and then feed into data warehousing services like Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Redshift, Google's BigQuery, or Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure, among others.

However, that support for competing cloud platforms will not extend to new customers, the company confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch. Existing customers will still be able to tap into other platforms, but new customers will need to be migrating data to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to leverage Alooma's offerings.

No financial terms were disclosed, but Alooma had only raised a relatively small amount (approximately $15 million) of private funding over the years. The price tag was likely quite small for a tech giant like Google.

Slowly catching up with Amazon and Microsoft

The deal comes as Google is investing aggressively to catch up to AWS and Azure. Market researcher Canalys earlier this month estimated that Google's market share hit a new high of 9.5% in the fourth quarter, still trailing Amazon and Microsoft by a considerable margin. Slowly but surely, though, Google is making progress in catching up.

The overall cloud infrastructure market grew by 46% to reach $22.7 billion in the fourth quarter, according to Canalys. For the full year, Google Cloud generated an estimated $6.8 billion in revenue, enough to grab 8.5% share for 2018.

Just last week, Google also announced that it was planning to invest $13 billion in offices and data centers all around the U.S., in part to support the growth at GCP that will require substantial investments in computing power.

In one of his first public appearances since becoming Google Cloud CEO, Kurian spoke at a Goldman Sachs tech conference earlier this month, vowing to expand the division's enterprise sales force while forging relationships with third-party systems integrators, critical distributors in the world of IT.

"We are hiring some of the best talent from around the industry to grow our sales organization, and you will see us competing much more aggressively as we go forward," Kurian said.

This article originally appeared in the Motley Fool.

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