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It isn’t all that often that Google, with its 58,000 employees and numerous partners and contractors around the world, has to go and find innovation outside its fiefdom.
But it did Aug. 8, when the huge web services provider acquired Orbitera, a West Hollywood, California-based startup that has developed a new-gen platform for buying and selling cloud-based software, something Google did not already have at its disposal.
Terms of the deal were not announced, but TechCrunch reported that the price was just over $100 million.
Ostensibly, the new addition will improve how Google is able to compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Salesforce in delivering enterprise services, and specifically selling enterprise services in the cloud.
“Orbitera has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software to multiple clouds,” Google’s Nan Boden, head of Global Technology Partners, wrote in the corporate blog. “This acquisition will not only improve the support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform, but reinforces Google’s support for the multicloud world. We’re providing customers with more choice and flexibility when it comes to running their cloud environment.”
Orbitera CEO Marcin Kurc, who formerly worked at AWS, will continue to run the company as if it were an independent entity, he said in his own blog post.
“The current model for the deploying, managing and billing of cloud-based software does not easily fit the way today’s modern enterprises operate,” Boden wrote. “Orbitera automates many of the processes associated with billing, packaging and pricing optimization for leading businesses and ISVs (independent software vendors) supporting customers running in the cloud. More than 60,000 enterprise stacks have been launched on Orbitera.”
According to the Orbitera website, these customers include Oracle, Adobe and Metalogix, which resell cloud services from third-party vendors as part of their larger enterprise businesses.
Orbitera said its focus is on providing four components of building cloud marketplaces: packaging and provisioning, billing and cost optimization, marketplace and catalogs, and trials and lead management.
Orbitera was co-founded by Firas Bushnaq and Brian Singer in 2011 and had banked about $2 million in venture funding.