Google Cloud Continues Enterprise Push With Cornerstone Technology Buy

'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 micro-services,' says Howard Weale, Google Cloud’s director of transformation practice. 'This approach to application modernization is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset.'

Google Cloud has acquired Netherlands-based Cornerstone Technology to help customers migrate their mainframe workloads to its No. 3 cloud platform.

Cornerstone's solutions to help customers modernize their infrastructure and applications on Google Cloud include migration roadmap development, conversion flexibility for programming languages and databases to prepare applications for modernization, and automated mainframe data migration, Google Cloud said.

“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 micro-services,” Howard Weale, Google Cloud’s director of transformation practice, said in a blog post announcing the acquisition today. “This approach to application modernization is at the heart of the Cornerstone toolset. 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.”

Customers can utilize Cornerstone capabilities through Google Cloud’s professional services organization and channel partner network, according to Weale.

Google Cloud declined comment on the purchase price.

Cornerstone got its start in 1989, according to its website, which lists ING, Micro Focus. Euroclear, Capgemini and Achmea among its customers. Brazilian financial services company Boa Vista is using Cornerstone tools to migrate its AS/400 and z/OS systems to Google Cloud and more modern technologies such as Java and SQL databases, according to Weale’s blog post.

The Cornerstone acquisition is part of Google Cloud’s push to attract more enterprise customers under CEO Thomas Kurian, who formally took the reins last January. Google Cloud moves have included reshaping and building its sales organization so it can compete in more customer opportunities and simplifying its commercial contracting process. It also added premium support last month for large enterprise customers that includes 15-minute target response times 24x7 from Google Cloud for highest-priority cases, and started offering IBM Power Systems as part of its cloud solutions.

The Cornerstone deal follows reports last week that Google Cloud, following other acquisitions, was eliminating a “small number of employees” as part of “organizational changes to a handful of teams” to improve how it goes to market and engages partners and customers across industries and geographies.

In January, Google purchased AppSheet, a 6-year-old Seattle startup that allows customers to build and distribute applications without writing a line of code. Google Cloud also closed its acquisition of Looker Data Sciences last week to extend its business analytics offerings, a $2.6 billion deal announced last June.