On Monday, 8th August 2016, Google announced its acquisition of Orbitera. Orbitera is a company that provides a platform where software developers can sell their cloud products to enterprises.Orbitera is more like a cross-platform app store, where enterprises can get all cloud-related products and software.
Now Orbitera is part of Google Cloud Platform. The acquisition is huge for Google as it struggles to overtake competitors such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. With Orbitera, Google hopes to overtake Microsoft Azure and close in on Amazon AWS, which is the world’s leader in cloud computing.
Previously, Orbitera has partnered with Amazon Web Services. In fact, Orbitera’s CEO, Marcin Kurc, is a former employee at AWS.
Orbitera as part of Google Cloud platform will make life easier for its customers. Google Cloud customers will be able to access security software, networking tools, and databases and other software they need to run their cloud services smoothly. The idea here is similar to an app store, easy access and flawless installation processes.
As much as this acquisition puts Google at a good place, Microsoft already created AppSource. AppSource is store for IT software and services for Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure customers. Microsoft took advantage of existing relationships and partnerships with software developers to mimic Orbitera.
Having a store where customers can easily access the services and software they need is a double edged sword. To start with it attracts developers as you have already identified clients for them. Secondly, it makes customers more loyal as they can easily find what they need.
But Google has the upper hand with Orbitera. Orbitera will not be exclusive to Google Cloud Platform. Software developers can rest easy knowing that they can still sell their software to other cloud service customers such as AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft Azure and other cloud service customers. “The acquisition will, on one hand, improve support to software developers and on the other hand reinforce Google’s support for the multi-cloud world,” the official Google blog stated.
Google appreciates one fact that all cloud service providers should be aware of: many customers use different cloud services. I could have my documents stored on Google Drive and confidential financial reports on AWS. Google is simply gunning for more clients in whatever ways possible by making Orbitera remain cross-platform.
Orbitera, founded in 2011 is based in West Hollywood, California. It has many customers such as Adobe, Oracle and NetApp. Last year, June, Orbitera raised $2 million in seed funding.
At the moment, the details of the financials of the acquisition are not clear. However, Tech Crunch stated in a report that the deal is “slightly North of $100 million.”
