Google Cloud’s focus on the enterprise continues apace, with the company announcing its intent to acquire Santa Clara-based cloud storage provider Elastifile.
Elastifile offers cloud-native file storage which promises an enterprise-grade distributed file system, as well as ‘intelligent’ object tiering. While the company had been somewhat under the radar – its most recent funding round of $16 million in 2017 was a little lower than average for cloud storage series Cs – its product set is bang on target for enterprise pain points. The company argues its set of features mean organisations do not need to refactor their apps when migrating to the cloud.
Google plans to integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore – and writing a blog post confirming the news, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted the synergies between the two companies.
“The combination of Elastifile and Google Cloud will support bringing traditional workloads into [Google Cloud Platform] faster and simplify the management and scaling of data and compute intensive workloads,” wrote Kurian. “Furthermore, we believe this combination will empower businesses to build industry-specific, high performance applications that need petabyte-scale file storage more quickly and easily.
“This is critical for industries like media and entertainment, where collaborative artists need shared file storage and the ability to burst compute for image rendering; and life sciences, where genomics processing and machine learning training need speed and consistency; and manufacturing, where jobs like semiconductor design verification can be accelerated by parallelising the simulation models,” added Kurian.
From the Elastifile side, CEO Erwan Menard outlined the rationale behind the move. “As we join the Google Cloud team, we are eager to build further upon our joint success, providing even more value to our customers,” Menard wrote. “Together, we are absolutely convinced that joining Google Cloud will enable us to serve the market with the best file storage service in any cloud, developed in a stimulating environment where our team members will continue to thrive.”
In June, Google Cloud welcomed business intelligence platform Looker into its ranks in what was reported as a $2.6bn (£2.05bn) all-cash transaction. The move was seen as a further indication of Google’s move into multi-cloud, in particular bringing together data from various SaaS applications – another important element for enterprises to consider.
Since Kurian took the top job at Google Cloud plenty has been discussed around the company’s ongoing ambitions, both for enterprise and multi-cloud. During his first public speaking gig in February, Kurian noted his plan to hire more sales staff and focus more aggressively on larger, traditional companies. At Google Next in April, the latter went a step further, with Google announcing its cloud services platform Anthos would accommodate AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
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