Google LLC has acquired CloudSimple Inc., a Santa Clara, California-based startup with a software platform that makes it easier for companies to move their on-premises applications to the cloud.

The search giant didn’t disclose the purchase price in the acquisition announcement this morning. CloudSimple raised a seed investment from Microsoft Corp. in 2016 and lists 77 employees on its LinkedIn profile.

The startup’s software makes it possible to deploy VMware Inc.’s vSphere hypervisor and related virtualization tools on Google Cloud. Companies can take their on-premises vSphere workloads and move them over to an off-premises CloudSimple deployment without making any major architectural changes, since the software environment is the same. That in turn reduces the amount of effort involved in migrations, which Google hopes will help encourage more companies to shift their applications to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. 

“Many enterprises are using VMware in their on-premises environments to run a variety of workloads: business applications such as ERP and CRM; databases such as Oracle and SQL Server; development and test environments,” Rich Sanzi, Google Cloud’s vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post. “With CloudSimple, our customers can migrate their VMware workloads from on-premises data centers directly into Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, while also creating new VMware workloads as needed.”

In addition to Google Cloud, CloudSimple also runs on Microsoft Corp.’s rival Azure platform. Sanzi didn’t specify whether the  platform will continue to support the competition in the wake of the acquisition, but that possibility it can’t be ruled out entirely. The search giant provides a suite of products called Anthos that allows companies to use some Google Cloud features on other infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.

The acquisition of CloudSimple marks co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Guru Pangal’s second major exit. Pangal’s previous startup, hybrid cloud storage supplier StorSimple Inc., was acquired by Microsoft back in 2012.

Google makes extensive use of acquisitions as part of its cloud strategy. Earlier this year, it spent a reported $200 million to pick up Elastifile Ltd., a startup that developed a file system for cloud applications. Microsoft doesn’t shy away from strategic acquisitions either: It bought infrastructure visibility provider Movere Inc. in September after a number of earlier deals.

Image: Google