Google Doubles Down on Cloud Data Migration

Data integration startups have become prime acquisition targets as cloud analytics vendors look to beef up their migration capabilities.

What that in mind, Google Cloud announced this week it intends to acquire data migration specialist Alooma, a five-year-old Bay Area startup. Terms were not disclosed, but the parties said the acquisition was subject to standard closing conditions.

Google executives said Alooma’s data pipeline tools would help enterprise customers ease the migration of core applications and data to the cloud. Those tools enable customers to move data from multiple sources to a single data warehouse.

“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,” Google said in a blog post. “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 Alooma deal is Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) second cloud migration acquisition in the last eight months. Last May, Google Cloud acquired data migration startups Cask Data and Velostrata. Cask Data developed an application platform that among other things integrates Hadoop and Apache Spark.

Alooma has previously partnered with Google Cloud on several native integrations to its data migration platform, including Cloud Spanner and BigQuery. The startup specializes in data pipelines that organize enterprise data from a variety of sources into standard formats for migration into data warehouses. The acquisition brings “us one step closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience,” Alooma co-founders Yoni Broyde and Yair Weinberger said in a separate blog post announcing the deal.

Google Cloud’s steady push into migration tools illustrates a big data strategy designed to differentiate its cloud services as more enterprise customers look to expand their cloud providers beyond public cloud leader Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN). Google Cloud said Alooma’s platform would continue to support existing customers using other cloud platforms. New data migration customers would be restricted to Google Cloud.

Along with Google Cloud’s foray into the data infrastructure sector, ETL software developer Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) acquired cloud data integrator Stitch in November for $60 million.

Data prep work, including integration and transformation, can take up 60 percent or more of an engineer’s or analyst’s time. Companies like Stitch and its competitors Alooma and Fivetran have attempted to simplify the process to the point where users don’t need formal training to use the products.

With the data migration sector consolidating, Fivetran senses an opening. It offers an automated ETL pipeline that connects with the Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse. In pitching enterprise customers affected by the data pipeline acquisitions, Fivetran asserts: “No matter how complex their use case, [customers] will benefit from automations in their data pipelines and a cloud-first ELT (extract, load, transform) approach, and we think that ‘graduating’ customers to an unmanaged ETL method takes several steps backward.”

Recent items:

Talend Buys Stitch for $60M

Google Cloud Adds Cask Data

Snowflake Taps Quoble For Deep Learning in the Cloud