Google Cloud continues to lag market leader Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure by a significant margin, taking – at the most recent estimate – just six percent of the cloud market. Recent acquisition, Israel’s Velostrata, shows the multinational tech giant is serious about gunning for strategic growth in the sector however.
The deal, announced on May 9, will see Google (subject to approval) snap up the Tel Aviv-based startup, which has serviced clients including Intel, the UK’s Department of Education and mining giant Rio Tinto. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Velostrata has raised $31.5 million since 2014, pitching itself as a service that works with a lot of different providers – including Google Cloud rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The acquisition could give Google a unique weapon in its cloud migration armoury, while depriving others of the same. Is this enough?
What Does Velostrata Do?
Velostrata is a cloud migration specialist. Its “real-time agentless workload streaming” technology allows companies to shift their workloads to the public cloud in minutes by decoupling compute from storage. Using the system companies can keep the bulk of their data in private cloud or data centres and just stream the compute portion of their workloads to a public cloud provider.
Eyal Manor, Google Cloud’s vice president of engineering, said in a blog that the acquisition enables Google Cloud customers to obtain two important benefits.
“They’ll be able to adapt their workloads on-the-fly for cloud execution, and they can decouple their compute from storage without performance degradation. This means they can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud. On top of that, customers can control and automate where their data lives at all times—either on-premises or in the cloud—in as little as a few clicks.”
Google Urgently Needs to Play Catch-Up
The new tech for Google will come after a major client win in Twitter earlier this month that will see Google Cloud host more than 300PB of Twitter data. It is also sorely needed.
As James Beswick, co-founder of cloud solutions specialist Indevelo put it in a blog earlier this year: “If you go to the conferences, look at [Google Cloud’s] marketing materials and check out the partner eco-system, they are simply not effectively targeting an enterprise audience. It’s techie, it’s nerdy, it’s academic, it’s esoteric, and whatever technical advantages they have over the competition are being completely ignored by the large adopters and eclipsed by competitors.”
Google would disagree. It’s Bigquery tool is one of the cloud world’s most feature-packed tools for data analytics which can be used with very little training and the provider, unlike some of its rivals, offers per-second billing as an option for all virtual machines, regardless of the Operating System they run on and is generally making a concerted effort to stay in the game.
Computer Business Review would expect more acquisitions in this space.
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