Google LLC today announced that it has acquired Cornerstone Technology B.V., a Netherlands-based provider of software and consulting services for modernizing mainframe applications.

One of the company’s main focus areas is helping enterprises move mainframe applications to cloud platforms such as Google Cloud.

Cornerstone has a software toolkit called G4 that can take a legacy workload and, using rules defined manually by engineers, adapt it  to run in a new environment. The toolkit provides the ability to modularize applications into software containers and also lends itself to migrating databases.

Mainframes, which have been around since the 1950s, are still widely used by companies such as banks to power mission-critical workloads. The addition of Cornerstone’s tools should enable Google to compete better for those mainframe workloads.

Tools that can automate application transfers have a big role in cloud migration projects due to the complexity of enterprise software. But they’re particularly important when it comes to mainframe workloads, since those are often written in legacy languages such as Cobol that were created before the rise of the public cloud. 

“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 microservices,” Howard Weale, director of Google Cloud’s transformation practice, wrote in a blog post. “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.” 

Beyond its software, the Dutch company also brings a well-established mainframe consulting practice to the table. Cornerstone lists over a dozen major customers on its website including Capgemini SE and financial giant Deutsche Bank AG’s Postbank business.

The kind of mission-critical applications that companies run on mainframes not only have special migration requirements but also require a strong cybersecurity layer. Google has been bolstering its cloud platform’s security features in a bid to better meet the needs of sensitive enterprise applications. The search giant added integrations with a raft of popular breach prevention tools in December and, earlier, added new encryption management features.

Google from time to time accelerates its cloud engineering roadmap with strategic acquisitions. The Cornerstone deal is just the latest example. The search giant has acquired two other migration providers in recent years, namely Velostrata Inc. in 2018 and Alooma Inc. in 2019.

Image: Google