Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian promised an aggressive approach to enterprise cloud strategy going forward – and the company has immediately put its money where its mouth is with the acquisition of California and Tel Aviv-based startup Alooma.
Alooma aims to solve a key problem for enterprise organisations in their move to the cloud by offering a single data pipeline which is able to crunch data from various sources, from Snowflake, to Google-tied BigQuery, Azure and Amazon RedShift, to provide real-time insights.
The company, which had received around $15 million across three funding rounds during its tenure, had previously been a long-term partner of Google with several native integrations, from Google Ads and Analytics to database service Cloud Spanner, not to mention BigQuery. Its roster of customers includes OkCupid, Sony, and The New York Times, which already uses Google App Engine for its gaming platform, having moved from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2017.
In a letter to Alooma’s customers and partners, published on the company’s blog, founders Yoni Broyde and Yair Weinberger noted the evolutionary nature of the acquisition. “The journey is not over,” Broyde and Weinberger wrote. “Alooma has always aimed to provide the simplest and most efficient path toward standardising enterprise data from every source and transforming it into actionable intelligence.
“Joining Google Cloud will bring us one step closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience bolstered by the power of their cloud technology, including analytics, security, AI, and machine learning,” they added.
From Google’s perspective the acquisition focuses on three primary areas; the need for open source, the continued enterprise push, as well as bolstering its Israel presence. Writing in a blog, VP engineering Amit Ganesh and director of product management Dominic Preuss noted parallels with Google’s acquisition of cloud migration provider Velostrata last year, which ticked all three boxes.
Earlier this month, Kurian told delegates at a Goldman Sachs conference of his vision for the company and how its cloud offering differs from the likes of AWS and Azure. These were, in order, security and reliability for mission critical applications; hybrid and multi-cloud; ‘very advanced’ AI solutions; ‘vastly different’ capabilities for managing data at scale; and ‘integrating a number of Google’s technology advances with cloud to deliver industry solutions.’
The proposed acquisition of Alooma certainly focuses on managing data at scale, as well as promised initiatives around AI and machine learning – so watch this space.
