Google Inc. said today it will acquire the Israeli startup Velostrata Inc., which provides a migration service for moving applications from on-premises data centers to public clouds such as Google’s.

The move is designed to make Google’s cloud platform more appealing to enterprise customers, many of which have forgone a move to the cloud because the complexity of doing so.

Velostrata’s platform works by adapting on-premises workloads to be executed in the cloud, while helping to decouple compute from storage. The company claims its platform can reduce the time it takes to migrate apps to the cloud from weeks to “under an hour.”

“Velostrata is a technology leader in virtualization of this type to Google Cloud and other clouds, and even more so technology to bring that to containers,” Google Cloud Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at Nutanix Inc.’s .NEXT conference in New Orleans Wednesday.

Velostrata does this by separating virtual machines from the data they use, before migrating them outside of the company’s firewall. The core components of an application can be moved to the cloud in just a few minutes, the company says. The workload’s configuration settings are then adapted to the target platform, so it can got up and running almost as soon as the migration is completed. Once that’s done, the data is then streamed to the cloud provider as the final piece of the puzzle, without affecting the application’s ability to run.

“Helping enterprises to move to the cloud is of high interest to all infrastructure-as-a-service vendors, especially when they have to catch up like Google does,” Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “Velostrata’s packed compute and storage migration abilities can become a key tool to help enterprises to move to GCP.”

The acquisition comes barely a month after Velostrata announced a new service specifically for Google Cloud Platform. Previously, the company already offered such services for Google’s rivals, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

It’s not immediately clear if Google will close the rival services down or keep them up and running, as there could be benefits to both. “In combination with long-established AWS and Azure support, Google now has a potential cross-cloud porting solution which would make it easier to move loads to GCP after attracting them in the first place,” Mueller said.

The advantage in keeping those rival migration services alive is that it could help Google to position GCP as the “fixed point” in the cloud, as customers would first repoint from on-premises to GCP, and from there to other clouds if they desire, Mueller said. He added that Google was being smart by making its move now as the other services are already tested and have customers.

“It will be interesting how this pans out, if Google uses Velostrata exclusively for GCP migrations, or keeps supporting the other migration options as well,” Mueller said.

Google has been striving for months to make its cloud more palatable for traditional enterprises such as banks and retail firms. Examples of this include rolling out more options for direct connectivity to the GCP from various colocation data centers scattered across the world. The company has also forged partnerships with hyperconverged infrastructure providers such as Nutanix Inc. aimed at simplifying hybrid cloud deployments.

There’s evidence to suggest that Google’s strategy is working, too. Just today, the company announced its landed a new marquee customer in the shape of StubHub Inc., which bills itself as the largest ticket marketplace in the world. StubHub said it had selected Google along with Pivotal Software Inc. as its sole public cloud infrastructure providers, and will move its systems to their respective cloud platforms.

Here’s the full interview with Stevens and Ricardo Jenez, senior vice president of development at Nutanix, at the .NEXT conference:

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