It’s easier to win cloud business when it’s easier for potential customers to move their data into your cloud, and Google thinks a startup called Alooma can help move that needle.
Google announced Tuesday that it has acquired Alooma for an undisclosed amount, although this deal likely didn’t break the bank given that Alooma had raised $15 million, a relatively small amount of money these days. Alooma’s software makes it easier to move data from where it was generated, such as a sales database or application, into data warehouses like Snowflake or Google’s Big Query for detailed analysis.
It sounds like Google plans to use Alooma as a tool for migrating customer data into Google Cloud. “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,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.
“Data is the lifeblood of business and has only become more important as the volume of information the world produces grows,” Alooma co-founders Yoni Broyde and Yair Weinberger said in their own blog post discussing the deal. While everyone agrees that data is the engine that drives so much of the modern world — for better or worse — data can be very hard to move from one place to another.
The deal comes as new Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian starts to put his stamp on the company. Last week at an investor conference Kurian told attendees that Google Cloud will “accelerate the growth even faster than we have to date,” which the company is going to have to do should it want to make a dent in a cloud computing market dominated by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
