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While Google has the funds and the expertise to survive in the competitive cloud-based software market, the company has announced the acquisition of Orbitera, a cloud-based commerce platform which enables enterprises and software vendors to buy and sell software products on the cloud. Even though there are a number of other such service providers, the reason why Google decided to acquire Orbitera was that the firm offers a structured template for billing, packaging and optimization of pricing which is predictable and easier to use. Such has been its popularity that over 60,000 enterprise stacks have so far been launched on the platform and these include the likes of Adobe and Oracle.
In the foreseeable future, the acquisition will effectively be on paper as Google has decided not to interfere in Orbitera’s independent operations, nor will it fine tune the firm’s commercial dealings to suit its software. “Looking to the future, we’re committed to maintaining Orbitera’s neutrality as a platform supporting multi-cloud commerce. We look forward to helping the modern enterprise thrive in a multi-cloud world,” the company said. Therefore, regardless of the acquisition, the cloud platform ecosystem will remain as competitive as before and customers will continue to have the choice and flexibility to run their cloud environments. Given that Orbitera is already a significant player in the cloud platform market, Google may provide it with just that extra funding boost that it needs to improve its platform and offerings. As of now, Amazon and Microsoft are by far the largest cloud service providers and acquisitions like that of Orbitera will allow Google to close the gap in the coming years.
Recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google’s Cloud Platform runs four million applications and added that the cloud business is gaining significant traction with the passage of time. Earlier this year, Spotify decided to move its entire data storage infrastructure, which contained information of 75 million users, to the Google Cloud Platform and more such companies could sign up in the future if all goes well. At the same time, the addition of Orbitera, whose CEO used to work for Amazon’s AWS platform once, has brought in a large number of enterprises under Google’s cloud protection and the move should encourage other enterprises and independent software vendors to consider moving in as well. Despite its growth, it will be interesting to see if Amazon and Microsoft will be able to brush off Google’s challenge to continue to be the elite cloud-based platforms in the near future.