Picking away at bigger cloud computing rivals, Google LLC today said it plans to acquire Alooma Inc., which helps companies move their disparate data into a single cloud data warehouse.

Google didn’t say how much it paid for the Redwood City, California-based startup, which also has significant presence in Tel Aviv, but it was likely not a large acquisition. According to Crunchbase, the six-year-old company had raised a total of $15 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital Israel.

Alooma specifically helps enterprises streamline the migration of their databases into the cloud with a “data pipeline” tool that lets them move data from a variety of sources into one data warehouse in the cloud, including popular ones such as Google’s own BigQuery, Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Redshift and Snowflake Computing Inc.’s.

It’s backend stuff, and the company frankly describes its executives and staff as “plumbers.” But it’s a critical pain point for companies and an opportunity for Google, whose public cloud services still trail far behind those of AWS and Microsoft Corp.

“As organizations modernize their infrastructure to digitally transform themselves, migrating mission critical systems and the data that powers their business success can be daunting,” Google Cloud Vice President of Engineering Amit Ganesh and Director of Product Management Dominic Preuss wrote in a blog post today. “No matter where your data is stored — on premises, in our cloud, or multiple clouds — we want to make that information accessible, valuable, and actionable.”

Ganesh and Preuss called Alooma a “natural fit” to offer automated migration of data to Google Cloud, with access to its Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable databases for use with services such as analytics, security, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Although Alooma’s current product will keep supporting other cloud providers for existing customers, Google said in a statement to SiliconANGLE that after the acquisition closes, it will only take new customers moving data to Google Cloud, not to other clouds.

“One of the things we’re most excited about with Alooma is the deep expertise for both enterprise and open source databases that their team brings to Google Cloud, which will be critical in helping us build out additional migration capabilities within Google Cloud Platform,” Ganesh and Preuss added. In addition, they called out the startup’s value in growing its cloud presence in Israel, includes the Velostrata team acquired last May. Silicon Valley employees will work at Google Cloud’s Sunnyvale headquarters.

For their part, Alooma co-founders Yoni Broyde, the startup’s CEO, and Chief Technology Officer Yair Weinberger said in a blog post that the deal builds on a long relationship with Google. “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,” they said.

The acquisition is the first for Google Cloud under its new Chief Executive Thomas Kurian (pictured), a longtime veteran executive from Oracle Corp. who replaced Diane Greene last month. Last week at Goldman Sachs’ technology conference in San Francisco, Kurian vowed to accelerate Google Cloud’s growth.

“We are hiring some of the best talent from around the industry to grow our sales organization, and you will see us competing much more aggressively as we go forward,” he said.

In addition, Google parent Alphabet Inc. earlier this month reported that the cloud unit doubled the number of contracts and deals worth $1 million and up and saw an uptick in deals worth more than $100 million. “We’re getting large wins,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during an earnings conference call. “Our product offerings are ready and differentiated, so want to invest in scale and go-to-market.”

There could be more and bigger acquisitions coming, especially in the wake of large deals by rivals, such as IBM Corp.’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. announced in October. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian, quoted by CNBC, said earlier this month that he expects a “meaningful acquisition” to “enhance enterprise sales/support functions and SaaS capabilities,” given that Alphabet’s $109 billion cash hoard allows Google Cloud to “go elephant hunting.”

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE