Overview:
Cloud represents a growth opportunity for Google as the company is gearing up to increase its market share. According to Gartner research, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a lesser market share than Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but all three platforms are growing on an absolute basis.
In Jul-19, Google announced that its cloud unit, inclusive of G Suite productivity, had reached an $8bn annualized revenue run rate. This figure is double the run rate the company had claimed in early 2018.
Google has also tapped Oracle executive Thomas Kurian to replace former VMware CEO Diane Greene to run its cloud group last year.
About CloudSimple:
Founded in 2006, specializes in VMware virtualisation software which helps businesses run corporate networks and business software more efficiently. CloudSimple also supports Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and had received venture funding from Microsoft’s M12 division.
It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has over 75 employees1.
Guru Pangal, the company’s CEO, was previously a general manager at Microsoft and had co-founded StorSimple, which was bought by Microsoft in 2012.In Jul-19, Google had announced a partnership with CloudSimple to give the former’s customers a better VMware support.
Transaction relevance:
The acquisition continues to demonstrate GCP’s commitment to providing enterprise customers a broad suite of solutions to modernize their IT infrastructure. Large companies run their data centers with VMware tools. To ease cloud adoption, VMware has made its systems available on top of cloud providers’ infrastructure.
With VMware on Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage all the familiarity of VMware tools and training, and protect their investments, as they execute on their cloud strategies and rapidly bring new services to market and operate them seamlessly and more securely across a hybrid cloud environment.
The deal follows acquisitions of Alooma, a data integration company, Elastifile, a storage company and Velostrata, a cloud migration company. GCP also acquired Looker for $2.6bn to expand its cloud analytics solutions. Looker too had been a partner prior to being acquired.
“We believe in a multi-cloud world and will continue to provide choice for our customers to use the best technology in their journey to the cloud,” Rich Sanzi, a vice president of engineering at Google,