In its continuing bid for Google Cloud Platform to put up a better fight against rival cloud service Amazon AWS, Google has acquired startup Orbitera.
Orbitera provides its clients with a commerce platform that simplifies purchasing and selling software on the cloud, with the system scalable among all business sizes including independent software sellers, service providers and IT channel companies.
In an official blog post that announced the acquisition, Google narrated that the currently used model on the deployment, management and billing for cloud-based software is not in tune with the operations of modern businesses. Orbitera solves this problem by automating many of the associated processes, with Google noting that over 60,000 enterprise stacks have been launched through Orbitera's platform.
According to sources, the deal was for over $100 million, with Google acquiring not just the technology that Orbitera has developed, but also the talent of the company's team and the existing business that Orbitera has with its clients.
Marcin Kurc, the CEO of Orbitera, formerly worked on Amazon AWS. The customers of Orbitera include big names such as Oracle, Adobe and Metalogix, with all of these companies also reselling cloud services from third-party vendors as products of their larger businesses.
According to Google, the company teams up with its software providers and enterprise clients to make sure that transitions to the cloud are as simple and seamless as possible. The company also recognizes that clients are looking to use more than one cloud services provider.
Orbitera, as Google noted, has developed a strong suite of enterprise software vendors that delivers software to several clouds. As such, the acquisition will both provide improvements on software vendor support on Google Cloud Platform and reinforce Google's support for multi-cloud setups by giving clients more flexibility and choices.
Google's explicit support for multi-cloud deployments by businesses is a different approach compared with that of Amazon as well as another rival, Microsoft. Both Amazon and Microsoft, while supporting multi-cloud usage, focus their marketing on getting the clients to standardize within their respective services.
According to Al Hilwa, an analyst for IDC, Google is looking to build up its credibility among enterprises with this decision. The company may be thinking that explicit support for multi-cloud deployments will allow them to expand its ecosystem, which would lead to increased adoption and community engagement.
Just last month, Google also acquired Anvato, which is a company that provides clients with video platform services. The purchase was also made to expand Google Cloud Platform.
