Google Cloud Acquires Cornerstone Technology to Help Customers Migrate from Mainframes
February 21, 2020
By David Marshall
Google Cloud’s shopping spree is showing no signs of slowing down. In its latest move, Google Cloud acquires a technology that targets mainframe customers.
Cornerstone Acquired
This week, Google announced that it has acquired Cornerstone, a Dutch company specializing in helping enterprises migrate their legacy workloads from mainframes to public clouds. Cornerstone, a mainframe specialist, will form the basis of Google Cloud’s mainframe-to-GCP solutions.
The 30-year-old Cornerstone helps its customers protect and improve their investments in essential legacy enterprise applications, providing companies with insight into their entire enterprise application landscape and offers a highly automated and well managed migration process of their legacy applications to modern scalable platforms of their choice.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
From Mainframe to Cloud
According to Google, companies have relied on a mainframe architecture to run their mission-critical workloads for decades, but it often holds developers back from taking advantage of new technologies that enable them to innovate more quickly.
“As the industry increasingly builds applications as a set of services, many customers want to break their mainframe monolith programs into either Java monoliths or Java micro-services,” said Howard Weale, Google Cloud’s director of transformation practice. “This approach to application modernization is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset. Through the use of automated processes, Cornerstone’s tools can break down your COBOL, PL/1, or Assembler programs into services and then make them cloud-native, such as within a managed, containerized environment.”
Weale went on to explain that cloud computing presents the opportunity to “modernize your applications and your infrastructure, resulting in better capabilities and allocation of your resources so your organization can focus on your core business.”
Google customers will be able to utilize Cornerstone capabilities through Google Cloud’s professional services organization and channel partner network.
Other Acquisitions
This latest move continues a path of acquisitions for Google Cloud under the leadership of CEO Thomas Kurian. In June, the company purchased business intelligence platform Looker with a $2.6 billion all-cash transaction. Other deals included data migration service provider Alooma in February; a provider of scalable, enterprise file storage for the cloud called Elastifile in July; CloudSimple, a leading provider of secure, high performance, dedicated environments to run VMware workloads in the cloud, back in November; and in January, a 6-year-old Seattle startup, AppSheet, which allows customers to build and distribute applications without writing a single line of code.
It is also worth mentioning that Google Cloud recently introduced support for IBM Power Systems in its cloud, another move for the company to help enterprises with their move of legacy systems into the cloud.
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About the Author
David Marshall is an industry recognized virtualization and cloud computing expert, an eleven time recipient of the VMware vExpert distinction, and has been heavily involved in the industry for the past 20+ years. To help solve industry challenges, he co-founded and helped start several successful virtualization software companies such as ProTier, Surgient, Hyper9 and Vertiscale. He also spent a number of years transforming desktop virtualization while at Virtual Bridges.
David is an author of two very popular server virtualization books and the Technical Editor on Wiley’s “Virtualization for Dummies” and “VMware VI3 for Dummies” books. David authored countless articles for a number of well known technical magazines, including: InfoWorld, Virtual-Strategy and TechTarget. In 2004, he founded the oldest independent virtualization and cloud computing news site, VMblog.com, which he still operates today.
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