Google snaps up cloud data migration company Alooma

Going forward Alooma will only accept customers moving data to Google Cloud  

Google has announced it is to acquire Alooma, a company that handles data supply routes and combines them into popular services like Amazon’s Redshift, Snowflake, and Azure.

By managing and combining disparate data sources into a single warehouse, Alooma takes the pain out of complex cloud data migrations.

Step in Google, which desperately wants enterprises to move away from their trusted AWS and Azure deployments and embrace its own proprietary Google Cloud and also tempt public cloud-shy enterprises out of their private cloud shells.

AWS and Azure dominate the public cloud market, holding 31.7 percent and 16.8 percent shares respectively at the close of 2018, according to Canalys. In the same period Google Cloud was holding just 8.6 percent.

Alooma had previously raised about $15 million in funding, including an $11.2 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture and Sequoia – the latter famously investing in Google when it was just an unprofitable search engine.

‘A natural fit’

The acquisition means that Google has essentially cut off a powerful cloud data migration service from supplying enterprises seeking to move their data anywhere but Google Cloud.

Google’s hope will be that this transition factor will now be a profitable differentiator: if you want to move your data to the public cloud we can do it faster, and also get your data polished and primed for AI and machine learning use cases.

Alooma and Google confirmed to TechCrunch that it will not accept any new customers that want to migrate data to Google Cloud’s competitors.

Existing Alooma customers will probably want to start looking for other solutions too, as Google has approximately zero incentive to develop Alooma’s Azure/AWS capabilities any further.

“Here at Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping enterprise customers easily and securely migrate their data to our platform,” Google VP of engineering Amit Ganesh and Google Cloud Platform director of product management Dominic Preuss wrote.

“The addition of Alooma, subject to closing conditions, is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services, from managed open source database offerings to solutions like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable.”