Tech

Google acquires a small cloud start-up as it looks to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft

Key Points
  • Google announces plans to acquire cloud migration company Alooma, marking its next play in the competitive space.
  • Google's new cloud chief said earlier this month that people could expect to see its cloud business accelerate.
  • Alooma helps companies migrate their data from multiple sources to one data warehouse.
Thomas Kurian, the incoming head of Google Cloud and formerly president of product development at Oracle, speaks at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sept. 24, 2013.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google is making another play in the cloud space with a new acquisition. The company announced Tuesday it plans to acquire cloud migration company Alooma, which helps other companies move their data from multiple sources into one data warehouse.

Google's new cloud chief, Thomas Kurian, said at a conference this month, "You will see us accelerate the growth even faster than we have to date."

The acquisition appears to be one step in Google's plans to ramp up initiatives to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud space.

Google did not disclose how much it will pay for Alooma, which is based in Israel and California, but it's likely a relatively small acquisition. Alooma has raised about $15 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequioa Capital Israel, according to Crunchbase.

Here is the full announcement from Google:

Leading companies across every industry and around the world are moving to the cloud to be more agile, secure and scalable. As organizations modernize their infrastructure to digitally transform themselves, migrating mission critical systems and the data that powers their business success can be daunting. No matter where your data is stored—on premises, in our cloud, or multiple clouds—we want to make that information accessible, valuable, and actionable.

That's why today we're announcing our intent to acquire Alooma, a leader in data migration. Alooma helps enterprise companies streamline database migration in the cloud with an innovative data pipeline tool that enables them to move their data from multiple sources to a single data warehouse.

Here at Google Cloud, we're committed to helping enterprise customers easily and securely migrate their data to our platform. The addition of Alooma, subject to closing conditions, is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services, from managed open source database offerings to solutions like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable. This simplified migration path also opens the door for customers to take advantage of all the technologies we have to offer, including analytics, security, AI and machine learning.

One of the things we're most excited about with Alooma is the deep expertise for both enterprise and open source databases that their team brings to Google Cloud, which will be critical in helping us build out additional migration capabilities within Google Cloud Platform. We're also looking forward to adding to our growing Google Cloud footprint in Israel, which includes the Velostrata team we added last summer.

For more information, you can read Alooma's blog post by co-founders, Yoni Broyde and Yair Weinberger.

Stay tuned for more details after close!

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