Google buys Orbitera, a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software; source says Google paid $100M+
Google today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it competes against Amazon's AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services …
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal lands five months after sources reported Google was shopping for acquisitions to expand its cloud business, with a shortlist that included Shopify, Namely, Metavine, CallidusCloud and Xactly Google's cloud acquisition search. Orbitera — a marketplace for buying and selling cloud-based software, reportedly going for $100M+ — is the first of those targets to convert into a signed deal, and it addresses the gap TechCrunch flags directly: enterprise services, where Google trails Amazon's AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft.
The pattern holds over the following years: Google goes on to buy cloud-migration startup Alooma in 2019 the Alooma acquisition and data-management company Actifio in 2020 the Actifio acquisition, each a tuck-in filling a specific hole in the enterprise stack rather than a headline-grabbing merger.
First-order effects
- Orbitera's buy-and-sell platform for cloud software becomes part of Google Cloud, giving enterprise customers a procurement layer on GCP they previously had to find elsewhere.
- AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft now face a competitor that has paid nine figures specifically to close the enterprise-services gap, rather than building tooling organically.
Second-order effects
- Independent software vendors selling cloud-based tools gain a new route to market inside Google's ecosystem, shifting leverage toward whoever controls the marketplace where enterprise buyers transact.
- Rivals with established enterprise channels are pushed to defend their own procurement and billing layers, since the buyer relationship — not just compute capacity — is what this deal targets.
Third-order effects
- If the Alooma and Actifio follow-ons are any guide, hyperscale cloud competition settles into a cadence of capability acquisitions, where the big three assemble enterprise stacks piece by piece instead of competing on infrastructure alone.
- Marketplace ownership becomes a structural moat: whoever runs the layer where enterprises discover, buy and manage cloud software captures margin and data across every transaction flowing through it.
The trend: Google is building its enterprise cloud business through serial tuck-in acquisitions — Orbitera, then Alooma, then Actifio — assembling against AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft one capability at a time.