Google to acquire cloud data migration start-up ‘Alooma’

On Tuesday, Google announced its plans to acquire cloud migration company Alooma, which helps other companies move their data from multiple sources into a single data warehouse. Alooma not only provides services to help with migrating to the cloud but also helps in cleaning up this data and then using it for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning use cases.

Google Cloud’s blog states that “ The addition of Alooma, subject to closing conditions, is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services, from managed open source database offerings to solutions like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable”

The financial details of the deal haven't been released yet. In early 2016, Alooma raised about $15 million, including an $11.2 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Aloomas’ blog states that “Joining Google Cloud will bring us one step closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience bolstered by the power of their cloud technology, including analytics, security, AI, and machine learning”

In a statement to TechCrunch, Google says “Regarding supporting competitors, yes, the existing Alooma product will continue to support other cloud providers. We will only be accepting new customers that are migrating data to Google Cloud Platform, but existing customers will continue to have access to other cloud providers.” This means that, after the deal is closed, Alooma will not accept any new customers who want to migrate data to any competitors--for instance, Amazon’s Azure. Those who use Alooma in combination with AWS, Azure and other non-Google services will likely start looking for other solutions.