Google adds another cloud company to take on Amazon’s AWS

Google is buying Orbitera, a five-year-old platform for cloud marketplaces that should help the company to take on Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services.

“This acquisition will not only improve support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform but also provides customers with more choice and flexibility in today’s multi-cloud world,” Google said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

According to Orbitera CEO MarcinKurc, this is an acquisition of talent, technology, and existing business and notes in his announcement that Google will keep everything running as is, “at this time.”

The startup says its focus is on providing four (end-to-end) aspects of building cloud marketplaces: Packaging and Provisioning, Billing and Cost Optimization, Marketplace and Catalogs, Trials and Lead Management. It looks like Google will continue to operate that business on behalf of existing users, and maybe to help out its own marketplace for cloud services on its own cloud platform.

“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,” writes Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google.

Neither company shared the price tag for Orbitera, which had raised only $2 million.

But the deal fits with Google’s overall enterprise strategy. That, according to sources familiar with its plans, is to unify its sales organization — the previously disjointed teams that sold its cloud storage and apps for work products — in order to catch up to the more robust revenue engines from Microsoft and Amazon.

Orbitera was co-founded by FirasBushnaq and Brian Singer, who came up with the idea for the company to fix some of the “transactional and operational challenges associated with selling software” that they encountered while founding and working at previous tech companies.