Why Google Is Acquiring CloudSimple

By Amit Chowdhry • Nov 19, 2019
  • Google Cloud announced it is buying CloudSimple. These are the details about the deal you should know about.

Several months ago, Google announced it was partnering with CloudSimple in order to bring more enterprises to the cloud. And now Google is buying CloudSimple. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

CloudSimple makes it easier for businesses to run VMware vSphere workloads on the cloud and enables them to take existing on-premises tools and databases and seamlessly connect it to the Google Cloud. And their apps can run exactly the same as they have been on-premises while reaping all the benefits of the cloud such as performance, elasticity, and integration with key cloud services and technologies. And customers are able to achieve this without having to re-architect their existing VMware-based applications and workloads, which helps them operate efficiently and reduce costs while also enabling IT staff to maintain consistency and use their existing VMware tools, workflows, and support.

CloudSimple also offered support for Microsoft Azure at the time of the acquisition. It is unknown whether that will continue happening after the acquisition closes.

“This acquisition builds on our existing partnership with CloudSimple that we announced earlier this year, allowing us to accelerate a fully integrated VMware migration solution with improved support for our customers,” said Google Vice President Engineering Rich Sanzi in an announcement. “The acquisition of CloudSimple continues to demonstrate Google Cloud’s commitment to providing enterprise customers a broad suite of solutions to modernize their IT infrastructure. We’re thrilled about the team that will be joining us, and the expertise they bring to Google Cloud.”

CloudSimple co-founder and CEO Guru Pangal said that the journey to create CloudSimple started in his previous job when he met a number of CIOs and executives who would pound the table during meetings with tech companies and said that they want to get out of their data centers in two years in order to move to the cloud. And Pangal said that the CloudSimple platform transforms bare-metal resources in public cloud data centers into “as-a-service” private clouds that are able to be fast-provisioned in an automated way. And these private clouds are managed through a single portal thus enabling customers to easily access all the public cloud services while benefiting from scalable monitoring, alerting, fault tolerance, and 24×7 support of private clouds.

Pangal previously sold a startup called StorSimple to Microsoft in 2012. And he worked at Microsoft for four years to help ramp up Microsoft Azure. After leaving Microsoft, he launched CloudSimple and received funding from Microsoft’s venture capital arm.

“We look forward to continuing our partnership with Google Cloud as they welcome CloudSimple, a VMware Cloud Verified partner,” added Ajay Patel, senior vice president, Cloud Provider Software Unit at VMware. “Our partnership with Google Cloud enables our mutual customers to run VMware workloads on VMware Cloud Foundation in Google Cloud Platform. With VMware on Google Cloud Platform, customers will be able to leverage all of 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.”

Even though Google Cloud trails behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has been making aggressive moves to build up Google’s cloud business.

Ever since Kurian was named as the head of Google Cloud in January 2019, he oversaw the acquisitions of Elastifile, Looker ($2.6 billion), and Alooma. So the acquisition of CloudSimple is Alphabet’s fourth acquisition made on behalf of the Google Cloud Platform this year alone.