Google
today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it
competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of
enterprise services, and specifically selling enterprise services in the cloud:
it has acquired Orbitera, a startup that developed a platform for buying and
selling cloud-based software.
Terms of the
deal have not been disclosed but our sources close to the deal tell us it’s
just north of $100 million.
This is an
acquisition of talent, technology, and existing business. The CEO Marcin Kurc
(tellingly) is an alum of AWS. And Google notes that some 60,000 enterprise
stacks have already been launched on Orbitera. These include the likes of
Adobe, Oracle and Metalogix, who all resell cloud services from third-party
vendors as part of their larger enterprise businesses.
“This
acquisition will not only improve support of software vendors on Google Cloud
Platform but also provides customers with more choice and flexibility in
today’s multi-cloud world,” Google said in a statement provided to media.
Kurc notes
in his announcement that Google will keep everything running as is, “at this
time.”
The startup
says its focus is on providing four (end-to-end) aspects of building cloud
marketplaces: Packaging and Provisioning, Billing and Cost Optimization,
Marketplace and Catalogs, Trials and Lead Management.
It looks
like Google will continue to operate that business on behalf of existing users,
and maybe to help out its own marketplace for cloud services on its own cloud
platform.
“Looking to
the future, we’re committed to maintaining Orbitera’s neutrality as a platform
supporting multi-cloud commerce. We look forward to helping the modern
enterprise thrive in a multi-cloud world,” writes Nan Boden, head of global
technology partners at Google.
As Google
has grown well beyond its earliest roots as a search company, its reached an
interesting relationship with companies that are at turns friends and rivals to
its own business interests.
Buying a
platform company that works with so many of these in the area of cloud services
is an interesting development for Google, and one that it’s keen to try to
tread carefully in making.
In this
case, Google is trying to reassure customers that even as it sells a platform
to sell products, it recognises that the ultimate repository of those products
might not be Google itself.
(Whether or
not that is the case longer term is another question — in other areas like ads,
Google has walked an impartial line and then changed course — but for now there
is a viable enough business for Google in remaining a neutral party.)
“We
recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more
than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of
concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted
SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles,” Boden notes.
“Orbitera
has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software
to multiple clouds. This acquisition will not only improve the support of
software vendors on Google Cloud Platform, but reinforces Google’s support for
the multi-cloud world. We’re providing customers with more choice and
flexibility when it comes to running their cloud environment.”
Orbitera was
co-founded by Firas Bushnaq and Brian Singer, who came up with the idea for the
company to fix some of the “transactional and operational challenges associated
with selling software” that they encountered while founding and working at
previous tech companies.
Contact Spokes Technologies or 9568180808: For Web Development, Software Development and Placements.
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